The first major biography of the irrepressible woman who changed the way we view and live in cities, and whose influence is felt to this day. Jane Jacobs was a phenomenal woman who wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged in thousands of impassioned debates—all of which she won. Robert Kanigel's revelatory portrait of Jacobs, based on new sources and interviews, brings to life the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the mother who raised three children; the journalist who honed her skills at Architectural Forum and Fortune before writing her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities ; and the activist who helped lead a successful protest against Robert Moses’s proposed expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village. Best Books of the Year, NPR  Top Ten Art Books of the Year, Booklist Top Ten Architecture Books of the Year, World Architecture Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction “A powerful and all too rare biography of the making of a female public intellectual. . . . Thrilling.”— Fresh Air (NPR) “Kanigel has written the definitive Jacobs biography . . . in prose that is as lively as her own.” — The Washington Post   “Sparkling. . . . Magisterial. . . . An exhaustively researched, beautifully rendered tale, revealing the human contours of a vigorous, original mind.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune   “A portrait emerges of an independent heroine who stepped into an arena dominated by men. She was Betty Friedan, Rachel Carson, and Erin Brockovich all rolled into one.” — Boston Globe “[Kanigel delivers] fast-paced and nuanced storytelling in a crisp prose style that engages the reader. . . . This most complete biography of Jane Jacobs to date is a treat to read.” — The New York Journal of Books   “Zestfully illuminating and entertaining . . . Kanigel’s delight in his subject . . . shimmers on every page.” — Booklist  (starred review)   “[Jane Jacobs] was great, and Kanigel gives her the great biography she deserves.” —Edward Glaeser, The American Scholar   ROBERT KANIGEL is the author of seven previous books. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and the Grady-Stack Award for science writing. His book The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. For twelve years he was a professor of science writing at M.I.T. He and his wife now live in Baltimore, Maryland, and he writes full time. The Great Bewildering World It couldn’t have been long into her life there that Jane learned what every New Yorker knew, that “the city” was Manhattan, period. The fur district she’d stumbled upon so fortuitously was in Manhattan. So was the diamond district.  Vogue  itself, New York fashion personified, was in Manhattan. The jobs she got that first year were all in Manhattan, as were the better jobs she sought now. So were Broadway, Times Square, Fifth Avenue, the tall towers, the publishing houses, the galleries, and practically all the other iconic places of New York. It was hard not to feel the pull. Jane had only to glance down Henry Street, at the great stone arches that were the Brooklyn Bridge approaches, to take herself in her mind’s eye to Manhattan. For Jane, as for any young person of curiosity and spunk, the city beckoned. On one of her forays into Manhattan near the end of that first year, probably in late summer, Jane got out at the Christopher Street subway stop; she “liked the sound of the name,” she’d say. She had no idea where she was, “but I was enchanted with this place . . . I spent the rest of the afternoon just walking these streets.” As she got off the train, she’d have seen the name of the station set in mosaic tile, as in most of New York’s four hundred–odd subway stations:   CHRISTOPHER ST. SHERIDAN SQ.   Sheridan Square was no “square” at all, of course. But out of its irregular and unlovely expanse radiated Seventh Avenue South and wide West Fourth Street. Stroll along them, or on Grove Street, Washington Place, or Waverly Place, which all converged there, and soon you found yourself among a warren of little streets south and west of the square, the clubs and bars lining West Fourth Street that drew revelers from the outer boroughs, art galleries, small shops, modest apartment buildings. It was here, in a low-lying bowl of cityscape mostly off the tourist maps, far from the great employment centers, not grand, not rich, maybe a little ragtag, that Jane now found herself. No neatly defined shopping districts here in the streets near Sheridan Square, nothing like upscale Fifth Avenue or proletarian Fourteenth Street—no neatly defined anything. Blocks of handsome brownstones across Sixth Avenue that could have stepped out of a Henry James novel, musical Italian filling the shops and stoops of the tenements to the sout