American critic, urbanist, and historian of technology — the great American heir to Morris's line, and the writer who, across a sixty-year career of essays for The New Yorker (where he was architecture critic from 1931 to 1963) and two dozen books, made the relation between technology, the city, and the human person a central subject of American public thought. Mumford was self-taught in the substantial sense (his City College education was interrupted repeatedly by illness and never completed) and came to his intellectual formation through the Scottish biologist-planner Patrick Geddes, from whom he absorbed the idea that cities and human lives and technical systems should be studied as organic wholes.
Technics and Civilization (1934) — one of the indispensable 20th-century books on the human meaning of the machine — argues that "the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age," and divides the history of technology into three phases (eotechnic, paleotechnic, neotechnic) in a schema that has shaped all serious subsequent writing in the field. The Culture of Cities (1938) and its later culminating work The City in History (1961, which won the National Book Award) are the cognate achievements in urbanism — a case, sustained across thousands of pages, that the city at its best is a vessel for the widest human life and that modernist rationalist planning (Le Corbusier, Robert Moses) in much of the 20th century was actively destroying that capacity.
Mumford quarreled bitterly with Robert Moses over the 1958 Lower Manhattan Expressway proposal; his essay "The Sky Line in Flushing: Genuine Bootleg" (1962) did as much as any single document to derail the project. He was an early and public ally of Jane Jacobs, though the two later split over what he took to be her romantic neighborhood-scale thinking. The late two-volume The Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970) — which argues that the true origin of megatechnic civilization lies in the Bronze Age pyramid projects rather than in industrial Europe — is his most radical and least read work.