After graduating from Buckingham School, she studied at Radcliffe College, majoring in American history.
[1] In 1960, she wrote her senior thesis on the historian and urban critic Lewis Mumford.
[2] Kay began her career in journalism as a reporter for The Patriot Ledger, based in Quincy, Massachusetts,[1] but later worked primarily as a freelance writer and author.
Her most influential book,[2] however, is Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, a critique of the car's dominance on American culture published in 1997.
[1][4] Jane Holtz Kay died November 4, 2012, at the Springhouse Senior Community in Jamaica Plain, aged 74, from Alzheimer's disease.