FROM among the five books Lewis Mumford had published by 1933, The Golden Day was his favorite.' The agreeable circumstances surrounding its composition had surely colored his choice. Following the appearance of Sticks and Stones in the autumn of 1924, Mumford had been invited by an English political scientist, the late Alfred Zimmern, to lecture at the newly founded Geneva School of International Studies in Switzerland. Twenty-nine years old at the time, the American must have been pleased by this expression of confidence in his future, as he admittedly was by the summer abroad. Returning home in September of 1925, he moved with his wife and infant son to a new apartment at Sunnyside on Long Island, a community housing development designed by two of their friends. Beginning a draft of The Golden Day, with notes from his Geneva lectures as the skeleton, he learned in early spring that Van Wyck Brooks was then at work on his biography of Emerson. Though normally in close touch with each other, they had hit upon their overlapping subjects quite independently, and the feeling that both experienced at this discovery, Mumford remembers, was of elation. Over a period of some weeks, they wrote one another excitedly.2 With spring came discoveries of more lasting consequence. In May, the Mumfords went for the summer to a large house in Leedsville, a hamlet about three miles from the village of Amenia and some eighty miles north of New York City. There the rural life that previously he had only glimpsed became real to him. Like his wife, Sophia, he had grown up in the city, in the most overwhelming American city at that, had visited