Gourt > Arts > Literature > Authors > J > Jacobs, Jane
Jane Jacobs, OC , O.Ont (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-born Canadian writer and activist. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been credited with reaching beyond planning issues to influence the spirit of the times. "Jacobs came down firmly on the side of spontaneous inventiveness of individuals, as against abstract plans imposed by governments and corporations," wrote Canadian critic Robert Fulford. "She was an unlikely intellectual warrior, a theorist who opposed most theories, a teacher with no teaching job and no university degree, a writer who wrote well but infrequently."
Life
Jane Butzner was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a Jewish family in that overwhelmingly ethnic Catholic city, the daughter of a doctor and a former school teacher and nurse. After graduating from high school, she took an unpaid position as the assistant to the women's page editor at the Scranton Tribune. A year later, in the middle of the Great Depression, she left Scranton for New York City.
During her first several years in the city she held a variety of jobs, working mainly as a stenographer and freelance writer, often writing about working districts in the city. These experiences, she claims, "...gave me more of a notion of what was going on in the city and what business was like, what work was like." While working for the Office of War Information she met an architect named Robert Hyde Jacobs — her future husband.
More on [ Jane Jacobs ]
Urban and Regional Planning :: Social Sciences
Columnist Krugman Wins Nobel For Economics
Mon, 13 Oct 2008 08:10:00 -0400
Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect trade patterns and the location of economic activity.
Le Clezio, Portrait Of A Gentle Writer
Sun, 12 Oct 2008 16:19:00 -0400
Though born in France, Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustav Le Clezio is a nomadic writer, whose work has been defined by his life of travel around the world. For him, storytelling means melting into the background.
Memoir Lives Life As A Widow
Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:00:00 -0400
Anne Roiphe was so dependent on her husband she literally didn't know how to open the front door without him. In her memoir of widowhood, she also remembers how he told her, years before he died, that he felt their marriage had been so strong, she would be able to find happiness again.
A Furious Voice, Forged In The 'Fire' Of Prejudice
Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:03:00 -0400
Jamaican-American novelist Michelle Cliff's essays — urgent, stripped of lyrical excess, discomfiting but illuminating — bear witness to a rough life that has shaped a radical, powerful and essential artist.
French Novelist Awarded Nobel Literature Prize
Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:08:00 -0400
French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature. Antoine Compagnon, a professor of French Literature at Columbia University, says there are two periods in Le Clezio's work: it was more experimental in the 1960s and '70s, and later it featured traveling and exoticism.
Celebrating Grace Paley's Uniquely Feminine Voice
Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:35:00 -0400
Writer Alix Kates Shulman remembers the 1960s as an age where men dominated the literary scene — that is, until Grace Paley's quirky urban voice and modernist short stories began to challenge the notion of what constituted great reading.
Jane Jacobs Interviewed by Jim Kunstler - Long interview, conducted in September 2000, with the American urbanist, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities,Cities and the Wealth of Nations,Systems of Survival, and other books.
Jane Jacobs: Writing on the Web - Links to excerpts and full text of Jacobs' writings on cities and other topics.
Reason Magazine: Jane Jacobs Interview - Bill Steigerwald, an associate editor and columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, interviewed Jacobs in mid-March 2001 by phone.
Meta Description: [ REASON, a monthly magazine of free minds and free
markets, examines politics, culture, and ideas from a dynamic libertarian
perspective ]
The Nature of Economies - Review of this book by Jacobs in Le Quebecois Libre, April 2000.
Meta Description: [ Jane Jacobs' latest offering goes beyond the use of metaphors as heuristic devices and is better understood as a search for universal principles that characterize complex systems, both « natural » and « human made ». ]
The New York Review of Books: Charles Dickens, Seer - Article by Jane Jacobs, published July 19, 2001, discusses Dickens' novel Hard Times and his observations of social conditions.
Meta Description: [ Preview of an article by Jane Jacobs from The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2001 ]
Urban Planning Guru Jane Jacobs on the Traps We Set for Ourselves - Canadian Press interview and profile on the occasion of the publication of The Nature of Economies. March 2000.
Vital Cities: An Interview with Jane Jacobs - Stewart Brand interview with the author whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities changed urban planning and policy by simply asking: what makes a vital city? Whole Earth, Winter 1998.
Meta Description: [ Full text of the article, 'DESIGNING/RESTORING - sociologist Jane Jacobs - Interview' from Whole Earth, a publication in the field of Health & Fitness, is provided free of charge by LookSmart's FindArticles service. ]
| Halloween Special Episode 7 - Season 1 Halloween Bash Ellen and her friends are on their way to a Halloween Party, but ... | |
| Next Video | |
