ABSTRACT
Nineteen sixty-one was a vintage year. Jane Jacobs published her first, enormously influential, book about cities, and E. H. Carr produced a wonderful account of the writing of good nonfiction. If Jane Jacobs can be likened to any creature, it is surely the magpie. This bird is notorious for selecting flashy items with which to decorate its nest. Although the magpie presumably thinks of its nest as one entity, ornithologists view it as having two sections, a base and a roof. So, too, although Jacobs's books about cities arguably form a connected whole, they have usually been treated as separate entities. Jacobs made a name for herself as an activist and writer in the late 1950s and early 1960s, notably with The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). While the academic profile of Jacobs's body of work has risen, few writers see it as an intellectually coherent whole.
