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First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Between 1928 and 1981 architectural and cultural critic Lewis Mumford exchanged nearly six hundred letters with Melville scholar and Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray. "In Old Friendship" documents that richly rewarding interaction. Covering fifty years of devoted camaraderie between two exceptional minds, the book offers profound insights into the intellectual frustrations behind their significant careers and the emotional needs that framed their vibrant, often dramatic lives. To Mumford, a writer who sought to change the course of world events, iconoclastic Murray became a welcome confidant, critic, mentor, and friend. The letters reflect the wide range of public and private interests held by both men. Love’s entanglements are aired alongside literary labors. By chronicling the private worlds of these intellectual icons, this volume emerges as a crucial research tool for students of American intellectual history and culture, literary criticism, urbanism, architecture, and political arenas such as World War II and the Cold War. It offers a unique prism through which to observe the dramatic shifts in American society and culture in the twentieth century.

"Superbly crafted little essays, Lewis Mumford's New Yorker pieces called 'The Art Galleries' well deserve this handsome republication. They offer supremely tasteful guided tours of the galleries and museums of Manhattan at the time when the canon of Western art, including modernism, was being secured, against a background of tension between abstraction and realism and between aestheticism and social commitment. The essays are a gift for our own troubled times from one of the great humane and versatile critics of the twentieth century; they offer the reassurance of urbanity, poise, and commitment to art as a primary social necessity."—Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Grey Emeritus Professor of English, Yale University

This survey of utopias was written in a few months and published when Lewis Mumford was 26 and newly married. "I conceived this book in February 1922, did the necessary reading for it by the end of March, and turned the final draft over to the publisher in June, in time to read the proofs before I sailed for Europe toward the end of July?. Such toward speed accounts for the incompleteness and superficiality of this survey; likewise for its happy brevity." Utopia, he points out, "might refer either to the Greek 'eutopia,' which means the good place, or to 'outopia,' which means no place." Mumford also delves into issues that are directly relevant today: social equity in his chapter on the country house ideal, for example, and the relationship between science and the arts in his concluding chapter about how we can find, or build, utopia.In the 1962 preface he explains that The Story of Utopias began with an awareness "that the impetus of the great nineteenth century, with its fund of buoyant idealism and robust social enterprise, had come to an end. If we were to cope with the new age before us, whose grim outlines had long been visible to sensitive, probing minds, we would have to overcome the massive aberrations that had in fact led to the debacle of the First World War. . . . When I started to explore the historic utopias, I was seeking to discover what was missing, and to define what was still possible." This book is in some ways the essential Lewis Mumford, an introduction to a man who had worldwide influence, and whose thinking is directly relevant to the challenges we face today.