Lewis Mumford, a Life

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 of his beloved city, whose every street and alleyway he seems to have explored with a view towards his future role as a theorist and critic of architecture and urban planning. What he learned from his studies of ""the culture of cities"" and ""the city in history"" (as he titled two of his most famous books) also served as the basis for his broad-ranging cultural criticism. To Miller's credit, he understands that Mumford's seemingly disparate interests are ""interlinked aspects of a program of cultural renewal that established him in the 1920's as a virtually independent moral force on the American Left."" A passionate interventionist before America's entry into WW II, Mumford's flew rhetoric isolated him from many of his friends and colleagues. The war also claimed the life of Mumford's son, whose early death forced him to evaluate his inadequacies as a father and husband. About the latter role, we learn far too much, since Miller details Mumford's infidelties--some of which were longterm affairs--with the same scrutiny he devotes to Mumford's vast oeuvre. Despite Miller's ponderous psychologizing and his occasional lapses in judgment (he calls Mumford's appearance on the cover of Time ""the crowning moment of his life as a writer""), he demonstrates both an understanding of Mumford's far-ranging work and a sensitivity to the times that greatly shaped it.