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A Thoroughgoing Romantic
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16919 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1990 |
2,693 Words |
| Author
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John Braeman
John Braeman is professor of history at the University of
Nebraska at Lincoln. |
LEWIS MUMFORD
A Life
Donald L. Miller
New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989
628 pp., $ 24.95
Lewis Charles Mumford - still with us at the age of ninety-four - was born in the last years of the Victorian age. He would remain a Victorian in many of his attitudes and values - his self-discipline, passion for order, and moral intensity. But he experienced the trauma of living during a time when change occurred with an acceleration beyond the imagination of past generations. He was for more than a half-century a major figure on the American, even international, cultural scene, turning out some thirty books and over a thousand essays and reviews.
Mumford's most significant work was done without benefit of a university chair, private foundation grant, or a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Although taking advantage in his later years of the financial pickings to be reaped from the visiting professor game, he retained a lifelong suspicion of (or to be more accurate, contempt for) the university as a stronghold of sterile conformism and Ph.D.s as narrow pedants. Mumford, Donald L. Miller writes in this biography, was "one of America's last surviving men of letters . . .[who] supported himself entirely by his pen, producing a body of work almost unequaled in this century for its range and richness."
Mumford was a loner who, for the most part, was not active in organized campaigns for one or another cause. He lived a disciplined,
... (1989 of 16134 Characters)
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