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Born in Flushing, L. I. in October 1895, Lewis Mumford was brought up on Manhattan Island, knocked around from City College to New York University to Columbia studying philosophy, biology and literature without getting a degree. In 1915 he met the most pervasive influence of his life in a little book by a Scot named Patrick Geddes, a biologist trained under the great Thomas Henry Huxley. Geddes had turned to sociology and to the study of Edinburgh and other cities. Mumford became a student of New York. Within the next few years he covered the city systematically on foot, studied architecture, learned to tell the approximate date c tenement was built from a glance at the fire escape or the cornice.
Student Mumford's long correspondence and friendship with Geddes did not end until 1932, when that great-bearded, great-craniumed and voluble Scot died in France with a knighthood fresh upon him. By that time Lewis Mumford had lived, worked, sketched and studied in London, Paris, Pittsburgh and New York. He had made a literary success with a biography of Herman Melville and had written the first meagre draft of what has since been expanded to Technics and Civilization and The Culture of Cities.
During the late '20s The New Yorker employed a bright young man who wrote a column called The Sky Line, noting the erection of Manhattan's new apartment houses and office buildings. In the criticism of architecture The Sky Line included such amiable judgments as that the new, incredibly ornate and lugubrious Roxy Theatre was "a truly fine expression of what a place of entertainment should be." In the autumn of 1932 Lewis Mumford took over The Sky Line and speedily transformed it into its present role of the most perceptive, severe and expert column of architectural criticism in the U. S. Manhattan architects, conscious of having blundered or faked, have learned that if nobody else will discover it, Critic Mumford probably will.
To his already strenuous list of activities, Mumford in 1931 added that of Visiting Professor of Art at Dartmouth, a job he filled until three years ago. With Esthete Paul Rosenfeld, Bard Alfred Kreymborg and Critic Van Wyck Brooks he founded The American Caravan to publish experimental writing. On this board of editors Lewis Mumford was the golden mean. In a sense he has performed the same function among liberal and left-wing thinkers. Without the literary edge and personality of an Edmund Wilson (TIME, March 21) but also without the slightest trace of malice or partisanship, Lewis Mumford has displayed a unique capacity for sensing and understanding the advanced thought, the advanced craftsmanship of his time, reconciling its contradictions in a persuasive synthesis. Shrewd observers ticket Mumford as the type of the New Liberal, find his typical antagonist in Old Liberal Walter Lippmann, who last autumn offered his version of The Good Society (TIME, Sept. 27). Old liberals and new liberals will differ as to which is the greater realist.
Sturdy, brown-skinned, brown-eyed Author Mumford has lived for two years in the little village of Leedsville, N. Y., 60 mi. north of Manhattan, in the low foothills of the Berkshires, with his handsome, even browner wife and two children, Geddes, 13, and Alison, three.