Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes

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 All that exists of those letters, and much previously unpublished material besides, has been meticulously collected and edited by Frank G. Novak, Jr.