Best known as an intellectual and cultural historian, Lewis Mumford is one of the most wideranging scholar critics of the century. During the 1920s he first established himself as a literary biographer, architectural critic, utopian theorist, urban planner, and student of American literature, culture, and society. Over the next four decades Mumford achieved much greater fame as a harsh and often gloomily pessimistic critic not only of American but of contemporary civilization, most of whose main tendencies he vociferously opposed. However, Mumford's international reputation rests above all on his major historical works of the 1930s and 1960s, monumental studies of the development of technology and of the history and culture of the city; these works form the solid basis of his critique of modern civilization. As an independent "generalist" lacking an academic degree, and for whom, like Walt Whitman, "Manahatta" was his university, Mumford moves constantly across disciplinary...