Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Inscribed
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, (1961).
8vo.; black cloth, stamped in gilt, red, and brown; orange topstain; dust-jacket, price-clipped; spine browned; lower panel lightly soiled; few small chips and closed tears.
First edition of Jacobs’s first book, a ground-breaking work on city planning, parts of which had seen publication in Architectural Forum, Columbia University Forum, Harper’s Magazine, and The Reporter. The book is divided into four parts: “The Peculiar Nature of Cities,” “The Conditions for City Diversity,” “Forces of Decline and Regeneration,” and “Different Tactics.” The volume is not illustrated, but bears the following note on illustrations: “The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might also listen, linger, and think about what you see.” A presentation copy, inscribed on the first blank in the year of publication: To Liz and Abby Layne, with admiration & warmest regards, Jane Jacobs / Nov. 1961.
Widely heralded as the most influential book on urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities garnered the following praise in the New York Times (Lloyd Rodwin, November 5, 1961):
Jane Jacobs’ book should help to swing reformist zeal in favor of urbanity and the big city. If so, it might well become the most influential work on cities since Lewis Mumford’s classic, “The Culture of Cities.” It has somewhat comparable virtues and defects. Not quite as long or comprehensive, it is wittier, more optimistic, less scholarly and even more pontifical. The style is crisp, pungent and engaging; and like its illustrious predecessor, the book is crammed with arresting insights as well as with loose, sprightly generalizations.
A great book, like a great man, “is a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of its greatness consists in being there.” For all its weaknesses, Jane Jacobs has written such a book. Readers will vehemently agree and disagree with the views; but few of them will go through the volume without looking at their streets and neighborhoods a little differently, a little more sensitively. After all, it is the widespread lack of such sensitivity, especially among those who matter, which is perhaps what is most wrong with our cities today.
Her publishers knew they had a revolutionary work on their hands. They write on the dust-jacket; “The solutions proposed by Mrs. Jacobs in this book represent a sharp break with conventional thinking on the subject and they carry with them the ring of simple truth which marks this book as an inevitable classic of social thought.”
An advocate of neighborhood preservation, Jacobs often questions why some neighborhoods flourish over others. In the early 1960s, when this book came out, the slum like reputation of parts of New York’s Greenwich Village did not deter its growth and renewal. Conversely, she observed, other neighborhoods which had been painstakingly gentrified – she cites New York’s Morningside Heights as an example –often quickly degenerate.
Jacobs’s later works include The Economy of Cities (1969); The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty (1980); Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principals of Economic Life (1984); Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1994); The Nature of Economies (200) and Dark Age Ahead (2004).
Jacobs, born Jane Butzner, was born in 1916, in Scranton, PA. After high school she worked as the assistant to the women’s page editor at the Scranton Tribune. She moved to New York City the following year, taking classes at Columbia and supporting herself at various jobs. She met her husband-to-be, the architect Robert Jacobs, while she was working for the Office of War Information. They were married in 1944 and had two sons and a daughter. From 1952-62 she was t
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