Mumford, Lewis

Early Years

Mumford was born in 1895 in Queens County, New York. His mother, a widow, had become pregnant unexpectedly, and she raised her young son on Manhattan's Upper West Side. What could have been a solitary childhood was happily relieved by the close bond Mumford forged with his stepgrandfather, who introduced him to the teeming metropolis. Mumford attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, but his academic record was mixed.

Lacking the credentials to gain admission to a traditional college or university, he enrolled at the City College of New York's evening program in fall of 1912. He toyed with the idea of pursuing an advanced degree in philosophy, but when he transferred to the more formally organized day program, he foundered academically once again. After being diagnosed with incipient tuberculosis, he withdrew from City College altogether; as a result, he would never earn his baccalaureate degree.

Although Mumford was already something of an autodidact, what truly saved him from spiraling into an unfocused adulthood was his reading of Evolution, a book cowritten by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson and published in 1911. Mumford immediately grasped the implications of Geddes's essential thesis: that humankind's cultural evolution was akin to its biological evolution and that the former could be subjected to as careful a scientific scrutiny as the latter. The investigative tool that Geddes proffered was the regional survey, a sociocultural study of a region and its myriad inhabitants. Mesmerized, Mumford devoured other books by Geddes, and in the process, he determined to model his own career path after Geddes: not to become a specialist in one discipline, but rather, to embrace all disciplines. The city, as the summation of all of man's intellectual and practical activities, would become for Mumford, as it had already for Geddes, the subject around which he organized his myriad interests.

Not long after encountering Geddes's writings, Mumford read Ebenezer Howard's seminal planning treatise, Garden Cities of To-morrow. That Howard's Garden City neatly complemented Geddes's regionalism became almost immediately apparent to Mumford. With pen and notepad in hand, Mumford began to comb the city of his youth with his eyes freshly attuned to sights ranging from geological formations to real estate development patterns. The next several years proved to be a period of intensive urban study for Mumford, interrupted only briefly by a stateside tour of duty with the U.S. Navy near the end of World War I. Mumford recognized the need to earn a living, especially after his 1921 marriage to Sophia Wittenberg, and thus, he began expanding his notes into published essays, articles, book reviews, and, eventually, books. As a freelance writer and critic, he explored such topics as architecture, literature, sociology, and politics in such publications as the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, the Dial, and the New Republic. In the early 1930s, Mumford began his long tenure as the New Yorker's art and architecture critic, a position that permitted him to continue his regional surveys while earning a substantial income. As an architecture critic, he disavowed romantic revivalism while embracing such progressive currents as the organi-cism of Frank Lloyd Wright and the functionalism of various European modernists.

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