John Reps is a historian of urban planning and an authority on American urban iconography. His book, The Making of Urban America (1965), was followed by five books exploring in more detail the origin and subsequent growth of towns and cities in the southeast and west. He has also written another half-dozen studies about 19th-century printed views of American cities, identifying the artists who created them, and explaining how they were drawn, printed, published, sold, and used.