Makers of the City

This book examines how the American city has been portrayed in the writings of Jacob Riis, Lewis Mumford, James T. Farrell, and Paul Goodman, four authors whose works are almost wholly concerned with the urban experience. In contrast to a national literature inclined toward negatively portraying metropolitan life, these writers testify to the virtues of the city. Each of the writers, although influenced by his own personal and intellectual loyalties, finds in the city and its institutions the power to generate and preserve human values. Hence, just as writing can mediate and interpret the urban environment, so the city itself fosters the humanizing imagination of the writer. In affirming the city’s virtues, Riis, Mumford, Farrell, and Goodman, raise questions similar to those in classical political thought. How do we comprehend the city and what kind of discourse best depicts it? In what ways is the city a humanizing agent? Is there an original human nature and how does the city enhance it? Makers of the City argues that the writings of these four thinkers dramatize what empirical urban sciences often dismiss or ignore: a writer’s commitment to the past and engagement with the intangible world of myth, fable, and tradition.