The Death and Life of Great American Cities

American author, journalist, and activist Jane Jacobs was born in 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She moved to New York City in 1934, where she became a journalist, writing for magazines including Architectural Forum and Fortune. As a resident of Lower Manhattan's Greenwich Village, she joined a grassroots movement in the late 1950s to save her neighborhood from its planned destruction to make way for new expressways.