Lewis Mumford

American · 1895 to 1990

Born on October 19, 1895, in Flushing, Queens, New York, Lewis Mumford was a self-taught historian of cities who became one of the most influential American thinkers of the twentieth century. He studied at the City College of New York and the New School for Social Research, but tuberculosis cut his studies short and he never finished a degree. In 1918 he joined the Navy as a radio electrician, serving through the final year of the First World War before his discharge in 1919, when he became associate editor of the literary magazine The Dial. He found an intellectual guide in the Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes, whose ideas about cities as living organisms, shaped by geography and history rather than by planners' blueprints, gave the young writer a method and a lifelong subject, one he pursued alongside Geddes's colleague Victor Branford. Mumford went on to write architectural criticism for The New Yorker for more than thirty years under the title Sky Line, and to publish a long, wide-ranging shelf of books moving between literature, technology, and urban history: The Story of Utopias in 1922, The Golden Day in 1926, a critical study of Herman Melville in 1929, and then the sequence that made his reputation, Technics and Civilization in 1934, The Culture of Cities in 1938, and The Condition of Man in 1944. His culminating work, The City in History, appeared in 1961 and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction the following year, distilling four decades of thought about how cities are built, how they fail, and what they are for. He argued, in the book's most quoted line, that a city's chief function is to convert power into form and energy into culture. He was married to Sophia, who survived him and lived to ninety-seven. Honors accumulated across his long career, including election to the American Philosophical Society, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, and Britain's honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1975. He died at his home in Amenia, New York, on January 26, 1990, at the age of ninety-four.