NEW YORK, NY.- Leo Marx, a cultural historian whose landmark book exploring the pervasive intrusion of technology on nature helped define the field of American studies, died Tuesday at his home in Boston. He was 102.

The death was confirmed by his son Steve.

Marx, who taught for many years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became a pioneer in an eclectic and still evolving quest to determine an American national identity, a pursuit that came under intense criticism after the Vietnam War, when scholarship took up issues like multiculturalism and social equality.

American studies, as conceived by its early practitioners, was an amalgam of intellectual history; the history of ideas and literature; and portions of other disciplines like philosophy, psychology and art history. Early on, scholars in the field described an air of intense excitement as traditional boundaries between disciplines were breached and subject areas were synthesized and reimagined in an effort to find the “meaning” of America in the context of turbulent political and social conditions after the Depression and the war years that followed.

Marx, who had been a student at Harvard of some of the foremost historians of the 20th century, including Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., added technology to the American studies mix. He found that its effects were acknowledged in much of the American literary canon, as poets, novelists and thinkers from Walt Whitman to F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to reconcile the country’s bucolic beginnings and abundant natural assets with its rapid industrialization.

In “The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America,” first published in 1964, Marx found that American writers had adapted the venerable literary genre of pastoral — born in the ancient Middle East and perfected in classical times by Theocritus and Virgil — to convey and reflect the country’s culture from the 1840s on.

The form, which favors an idyllic rural scene over a more sophisticated urbane one, was expanded upon by writers like Whitman, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would jarringly interrupt that setting — Marx called it an “interrupted idyll” — by pitting an industrializing culture against nature.

This literary use of a “pastoral ideal,” which could present conflicted views of industrialism, was “incorporated in a powerful metaphor of contradiction” that was essential to understanding the country’s psyche, Marx wrote.

“What possible bearing can the urge to idealize a simple, rural environment have upon the lives men lead in an intricately organized, urban, industrial, nuclear-armed society?” he asked rhetorically in “The Machine in the Garden,” arguing for the continuing relevance of the pastoral.

He found answers in “the region of culture where literature, general ideas and certain products of the collective imagination — we may call them ‘cultural symbols’ — meet.”

The railroad was the most prominent of these symbols; “the startling shriek of the train whistle,” he wrote, became to Henry David Thoreau, for one, a troubling intrusion on bucolic America in the 1840s. Another symbol with “evocative power,” Marx wrote, was the “monstrous steamboat” in Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” that “suddenly bulges out of the night and smashes” the raft that Huck and Jim are placidly riding down the river.

Marx differentiated between “sentimental” and more complex forms of pastoral. Sentimental pastoralism, he wrote, “is widely diffused in our culture, insinuating itself into many kinds of behavior,” including the “flight from the city” to the suburbs, “localism” in national politics and the power of the farm bloc in Congress.

“Wherever people turn away from the hard social and technological realities, this obscure sentiment is likely to be at work,” he wrote.

The more complex pastoral in literature, by contrast, recognizes and incorporates popular attitudes while maintaining “a more sensitive and precise, a ‘higher,’ mode of perception” of the intertwining of technology and nature in American life.

“The Machine in the Garden,” which began as a thesis at Harvard, took him 15 years to complete.

Harvard scholar Lawrence Buell, in his book “The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture” (1995), called “The Machine in the Garden” “the best book ever written about the place of nature in American literary thought.”

But he criticized what he called Marx’s abstracted, “metropolitan” view of technology’s effect on nature, contrasting it with the work of a more recent generation of scholars who, he said, took better account of the physical environment of forests, fields and bodies of water in their studies.

Marx addressed the seismic changes in his field in 2003 in a Boston Review article titled “Believing in America.” He played down the early project’s devotion to “interdisciplinarity” and characterized the rift in the field — “the Great Divide,” in his words — that played out in the post-Vietnam War era over the issues of equality and multiculturalism and whether scholars should construct a “master narrative” of what constitutes an American identity.

As a unifying gesture, he identified the “deep personal conviction” both of his mentors in the field and of more recent scholars.

Leo Marx was born in New York City on Nov. 15, 1919, the son of Leo and Theresa (Rubinstein) Marx. His father ran estate sales; his mother was a homemaker. At Harvard, from which he graduated in 1941, the younger Marx and many of his classmates and teachers were idealistic, left-leaning partisans or avowed socialists. He soon enlisted in the Navy and saw wartime duty off Pearl Harbor. He was honorably discharged in 1945.

The dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, just before he left the service, crystallized his early thinking about technology, politics, nature and literature.

“Quite apart from its tragic consequences, no other event in my lifetime so effectively dramatized the nexus between science-based technological progress and the cumulative, long-term degradation of the environment,” Marx wrote.

He married Jane T. Pike in 1943. She died in 2006. In addition to his son Steve, he is survived by another son, Andrew; a daughter, Lucy Marx; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

Marx earned a doctorate at Harvard in its History of American Civilization program, the forerunner of American studies at the university, in 1950. He was an assistant and associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota from 1949-58 and professor of English and American studies at Amherst College from 1958 to 1971, when he joined MIT.

As a younger man he enjoyed hiking in the wilderness and described himself as an amateur ornithologist and an “urban pastoralist.”

He was also the author of “The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology and Culture in the United States” (1988). His interest in iconographic images of industrialism, especially railroads, was reflected in “The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change,” a book he edited with Susan Danly.

“The Machine in the Garden,” however, stands as his most enduring work.

In the journal Reviews in American History in 2013, author David Robinson acknowledged the critical headwinds the book encountered 10 years after its publication but concluded that it stood as a classic work.

“Few works of modern humanities scholarship,” he wrote, “have enthralled so many and had such wide influence.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.