Geddes Mumford

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Lewis Mumford's tribute to his son is recorded in his book, Green Memories. Here is a customer review from Amazon.com: To deal with devastating grief over the loss of his son in combat during World War II, Lewis Mumford recorded his memories of life with his boy in this memoir. Geddes Mumford was only nineteen when he died on September 13, 1944, while assaulting German positions on the Gothic Line in North Italy. Adding futility to tragedy, the Germans never were successfully dislodged from North Italy, and only gave it up upon the full German surrender of May 1945. While this book has no content regarding Lewis Mumford's social theories, the death of his son in the war transformed Mumford's work in a significantly darker direction. His opus magnum two-volume work from the late 1960s, Myth of the Machine, could not have happened without this death of his only son and the watershed effect it had upon Mumford's life and work. (As a literary aside, during the big push on the Gothic Line of September 12-15 that took Geddes Mumford's life, Joseph Heller, author of the classic novel Catch-22, was flying overhead on tactical bombing missions against the same German positions.)