The Jane Jacobs Papers at Burns Library

Unless otherwise noted, all materials displayed in this exhibit are drawn from the Jane Jacobs Papers, MS1995-029, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. The collection is open and available for use in our reading room; please ask library staff for assistance.

During Jacobs’s third visit to campus in 1993, Burns Librarian Robert O’Neill asked her if she would consider having the library serve as the repository for her personal papers. Her simple reply: “I can’t think of a place I’d rather have them.”

Jacobs fended off biographers during her lifetime, but the year she died an unauthorized biography was published by Long Island journalist Alice Alexiou, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary. Anthony Flint’s Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City came next in 2009.

In 2009, Cambridge authors Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch teamed up with Boston publisher David Godine to produce an illustrated biography of Jacobs for young adult readers, Genius of Common Sense.

The 50th anniversary of the publication of Death and Life in 2011 prompted fresh appraisals of Jacobs’s writings and their impact, including two collections of essays: Reconsidering Jane Jacobs and What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs. Similarly, the centenary of Jacobs’s birth in 2016 brought out new biographical surveys: Peter Laurence’s Becoming Jane Jacobs, which does more than any other study to debunk the common myth that Jacobs was a simple housewife who miraculously managed to write a groundbreaking book, and Robert Kanigel’s Eyes on the Street, which borrows a favorite phrase from Death and Life to epitomize Jacobs’s urban philosophy.

Jane at 100

The centenary of Jacobs’s birth in 2016 occasioned a number of new publications, including biographical studies by Peter Laurence and Robert Kanigel, and a compilation of essays, articles, interviews, and speeches by Jacobs titled Vital Little Plans. Jacobs’s son, Jim, and granddaughter Caitlin organized an exhibition at Toronto’s Urbanspace Gallery that showed how Jacobs lived and worked at home.

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