Leo Marx was born in New York City in 1919, educated in New York and Paris schools, and at Harvard College. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and took his doctorate (in the History of American Civilization) at Harvard in 1949. He taught in the Program in American Studies and English
Department at the University of Minnesota from 1949 to 1958, and at Amherst College from 1958 until 1976.
Professor Marx's writings include The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), The Pilot and the Passenger (1988), (with S. Danly) The Railroad in American Art (1988), and (with M.R. Smith) Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (1994), and (with Bruce Mazlish)Progress: Fact or Illusion?(1996), and editions of work by Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain, as well as a number of critical essays on American writers and literary themes, especially having to do with the relations between literature and the city, the onset of industrialism, and the environment. Reflecting these themes he has recently co-edited (with Kenneth Keniston and Jill Conway) a collection of essays in the humanities entitled, Earth, Air, Fire, Water : Humanistic Studies of the Environment (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).
In 1976 he was appointed the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of American Cultural History (now Emeritus), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and a member of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He has been President of the American Studies Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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