Lewis Mumford, a Life1989

A multitalented man of letters, Mumford is one of the ""last intellectuals,"" Russell Jacoby's term for that generation of independent writers and thinkers who once survived without a base in the university. Here, Miller (History/Lafayette College) gives us an overly long--though compelling--biography that carefully places Mumford's achievement within the contours of 20th-century cultural and political history. Born in 1895, Mumford, the illegitimate son of a German housekeeper and her employer's nephew, was very much a child of the century, which he witnessed mostly from his native New York, a city that served as his Yale College and Harvard Yard. A sometime CCNY student, Mumford was the consummate autodidact, schooling himself in the writings of Bernard Shaw as well as in the development...