Lewis Mumford

"Between 1928 and 1981 architectural and cultural critic Lewis Mumford exchanged nearly six hundred letters with Melville scholar and Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray. "In Old Friendship" documents that interaction." "Covering fifty years of devoted camaraderie between two exceptional minds, the book offers insights into the intellectual frustrations behind their significant careers and the emotional needs that framed their vibrant, often dramatic lives. To Mumford, a writer who sought to change the course of world events, iconoclastic Murray became a welcome confidant, critic, mentor, and friend." "The letters reflect the wide range of public and private interests held by both men. Love's entanglements are aired alongside literary labors. By chronicling the private worlds of these intellectual icons, this volume emerges as a crucial research tool for students of American intellectual history and culture, literary criticism, urbanism, architecture, and political arenas such as World War II and the cold war. It offers a unique prism through which to observe the dramatic shifts in American society and culture in the twentieth century."--Jacket.

Mumford was the versatile New York cultural critic, famous for his writings on architecture, the city, and technology. His "master," Geddes, was the Scots biologist, sociologist, and planner, the "professor of things in general.". The letters reveal much about the intellectual culture of the first half of the twentieth century as they chart an extraordinary Anglo-American relationship between two very different men; this friendship, initially of master and disciple, even father/son, and based on a shared intellectual quest, inspired the work of both. All that exists of those letters, and much previously unpublished material besides, has been meticulously collected and edited by Frank G. Novak, Jr.

This volume brings together representative selections of Lewis Mumford's major writings on the central concerns of his life. Praised by Malcolm Cowley as "the last of the great humanists," Mumford (1895-1990) produced a body of cultural criticism and commentary that for its range and richness is unmatched in modern American letters. Author of countless articles and more than thirty books - including the landmark works The Culture of the Cities and The City in History - Mumford is arguably this century's foremost architectural critic. In addition, he shaped some of the most important public policy debates of our time, writing with vigor on such issues as urban development, transportation policy, land planning, the environment, nuclear disarmament, and the problems and promises of technology.

Studies in literature, history, biography, technics, and contemporary society. 522p. Index. Bibliography. - Amazon.

"ART AND TECHNICS traces the relationship, throughout history, between two conflicting impulses within man: the artistic, which is subjective, and the 'technical', which is objective."--Back cover.

In this concluding volume of The Myth of the Machine, Mumford brings to a head his radical revisions of the stale popular conceptions of human and technological progress. Far from being an attack on science and technics, The Pentagon of Power seeks to establish a more organic social order based on technological resources.

Collection of essays and papers.