By 1930, Lewis Mumford had given up. The radical philosopher-critic found his faith in historical progress – and human potential itself – crushed between the great war and the Great Depression. Salvation came from an unexpected source: the work of a then-obscure novelist of the previous century, Herman Melville.
Melville had died 40 years before, his life uncommemorated, his writing dismissed by critics and forgotten by the reading public. Mumford, by contrast, was a rising star in America’s intellectual firmament, an expert in fields ranging from ecology to urbanism. Articulate, urbane and promiscuous – intellectually and otherwise – Mumford seems a breed apart from the taciturn Melville. But, as Aaron Sachs reveals in his joint biography, Up from the Depths, the younger man found kinship and inspiration in Melville’s work.
