ABSTRACT
In July 1959, Jane Jacobs wrote Chadbourne Gilpatric—associate director of the Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation—to request additional funding to help her complete The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The image of Jacobs hammering away at a typewriter in her second-floor studio at 225 West Fourth Street offers a valuable addition to the personas through which the public has typically understood her. Although she had no doubt read Thoreau and Stowe, and was certainly aware of the work of her contemporaries, Jacobs's literary form and style draw much more directly upon the popular vernaculars swirling around the mid-century city. When pitching the idea of a "book about certain characteristics of the big city" to Gilpatric and the Rockefeller Foundation, Jacobs explained that she would be writing for the "general interested citizen, rather than writing for the specialist.".
