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A Thoroughgoing Romantic |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: John Braeman |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/1990 |
| Size: 2,693 Words, 16,134 Characters |
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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, structured, almost monastic life in which his writing came first, even before his responsibilities as husband and father...
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...here will be a new golden day in which man will be transformed. Wholeness will be restored, the mind will find it balance, and man will come into an organic relationship with nature.”
Mumford was, to put the matter succinctly, "a thoroughgoing Romantic.” And while romanticism has its attractions, our century has suffered more from too much irrationality than from too much rationality.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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