J.B. Jackson

J. B. Jackson, essayist and cultural geographer, founded Landscape magazine in 1951 and was its editor and publisher until 1968.

Jackson’s influential writings have been anthologized in several books, including Landscapes (1970), American Space (1972), The Necessity for Ruins (1980), Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984), A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (1994), which won the PEN International award, and Landscape in Sight: Looking at America (1997). Prior to publishing Landscape, he earned a B.A. in history and literature from Harvard University in 1932, traveled central Europe by motorcycle, served in the U.S. Army in World War II and worked on a ranch in New Mexico. In the late 1960s and ’70s he was an adjunct professor at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, and he continued to lecture widely into the 1980s. According to his New York Times obituary, he also supplemented his income with “laboring jobs at construction sites, gas stations and gardens.” 

Jackson, born to wealthy parents in France in 1909, died in 1996 in La Cienaga, New Mexico, where he had lived since the 1950s.