William Dean Howells called it his “Uneasy Chair.” Lewis H. Lapham thought it “a column always grotesquely misnamed.” Bernard DeVoto simply wanted to do something else—a books section—and tried to fob the job off on H. L. Mencken, who wasn’t available.

For the better part of two centuries, the Easy Chair—the oldest column in American journalism—has as often as not been a source of grief for its occupants. “The limitation of length and the long time-lapse are a monthly test of a writer’s professional judgment, not to speak of his luck,” DeVoto wrote in retrospect. (Over the course of his tenure, lead times grew from three weeks ahead of publication to seven, a gift of “the breath-taking advance in technology that is called American know-how.” Today, miraculously, lead times are longer still.)

There was also the pay—for DeVoto, $200 per column, which, his friend and biographer Wallace Stegner wrote, “would have appalled anyone less fecund in ideas or less bent on airing a point of view or less eager for some economic security.” ^* And to get paid one had to write it in the first place. “Easier said than done, the thinking for oneself,” Lapham wrote, at the end of his own time as a columnist. “I was never very good at it, and an opinion I always found hard to come by.”

And this is leaving aside the inevitable indignities: the readers, DeVoto lamented, who “understand that the Easy Chair is a department of The Atlantic,” the work always done “under pressure of haste and with the morose knowledge that I was not writing it well enough,” and the ultimately ephemeral nature of the enterprise—“even the copies kept in doctors’ waiting rooms wear out and are dumped in the bay or ground up for pulp.”

With this issue, Harper’s Magazine enters its 175th-anniversary year, the Easy Chair trailing not far behind. The column has taken many forms: personal comment, essay, travelogue, book review, investigative report, polemic, feuilleton, to name just a few. It has grappled with abolitionism and McCarthyism; exposed a conspiracy to sell hundreds of millions of acres of public land; and according to one theory, inspired The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town. If it has frustrated its occupants, it has also instilled in them a sense of pride and dedication.

Recently, feeling a bit queasy at the thought of presiding over something so storied, I found myself drawn into the column’s history. My thought was to dispel that sense of unease through scrutiny—whether through the inspiration that comes from seeing work done at its highest levels or the grim consolation of seeing that even the best occasionally end up mired in failure. How did its different iterations respond to the demands of the day? To war, social unrest, literary booms and busts? What was at the heart of the work DeVoto once called “not important” yet “indispensable”?

The column first appeared in the October 1851 issue, alongside an excerpt from the forthcoming Moby-Dick. At the end of the workday, the unsigned columnist wrote, the magazine’s editor had a way of throwing himself in the “old red-backed Easy Chair, that has long been an ornament of our dingy office, and indulging in an easy, and careless overlook of the gossiping papers,” recording those events of interest “with all that gloss, and that happy lack of sequence, which makes every-day talk so much better than every-day writing.”

The premise was a fiction—the column wasn’t written by the editor but by the novelist Donald G. Mitchell, who wrote mostly under the nom de plume Ik Marvel. He was soon joined in 1853 by George William Curtis, who eventually took over and in whose care the column first found its footing. Curtis, an orator and reformer who in his youth had spent several years on the utopian Brook Farm (“reading Plato and cultivating peas on 188 acres in West Roxbury,” as Lapham put it), was a friend and fellow traveler of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. He was also a crusading reformer—a founder of the Republican Party and an early advocate against slavery. His columns, written until his death in 1892, variously address suffrage, journalistic ethics, strikes and anarchism, and the inner workings of presidential nominating conventions.

Leafing through his Easy Chairs, one finds a reminiscence of Dickens at a dinner in New York and reports on the deaths of Boss Tweed and Ulysses S. Grant, when, Curtis wrote, “a great multitude, as it listened, recalled the solemn day of Lincoln’s death, and a few octogenarians, still hale, may have remembered the famous Fourth of July when Adams and Jefferson died.” In 1865, he published a recollection of hearing Emerson speak:

Perhaps it was in the small Sunday-school room under a country meeting-house, on sparkling winter nights, when all the neighborhood came stamping and chattering to the door in hood and muffler, or ringing in from a few miles away, buried under buffalo-skins. The little, low room was dimly lighted with oil-lamps, and the boys clumped about the stoves in their cowhide boots, and laughed and buzzed and ate apples and peanuts and giggled, and grew suddenly solemn when the grave men and women looked at them. At the desk stood the lecturer and read his manuscript, and all but the boys sat silent and inthralled by the musical spell.

When Curtis died in 1892, the column went dormant, and it was not until 1900 that it found another occupant in William Dean Howells (1900–20). Then sixty-three years old, Howells was eminent enough for the job. Before his name became a “synonym for middlebrow pusillanimity,” as Gore Vidal put it, and was then more or less forgotten, Howells was the acknowledged Dean of American Letters. Harper’s readers had ranked him above Mark Twain in a poll of America’s top ten writers, and by the time he took on the column he had published several major novels—among them The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes—and had been the editor of The Atlantic for a decade. He had also for years been writing for Harper’s, in particular the Editor’s Study, a column created for him by the editor, Henry Mills Alden, who wanted a recurring literary feature “corresponding to that which the Editor’s Easy Chair has to the current social movements.”

By the time Howells took it up, the Easy Chair was so closely associated with his predecessor that he felt compelled to perform an exorcism of sorts, a dramatic dialogue with the personification of the Chair, which he claimed to find hibernating in a warehouse, and which, once roused, asks him if he thinks he’s up to the job. (Howells replies that he isn’t, and proceeds to talk for so long that he puts the Chair back to sleep.) His subsequent columns took roughly the same form—dramatic dialogues—and had a sensibility generally in keeping with the magazine’s self-consciously literary turn. But though he once described himself as a “theoretical socialist” and “practical aristocrat,” and had even been cautioned by Harper’s management not to stir up too much trouble, Howells did from time to time weigh in on political events, advocating a federal income tax and land grants for veterans of the First World War, amid considerations of the finer points of love, marriage, life after death, and the role of art in society.

At the end of his life, Howells described himself to Henry James as “comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in the pale moonlight.” His successor in the Easy Chair put it somewhat more bluntly: “He saw the era that he had lived in end, and grieved undoubtedly at the sight. He hated war and wrote no more about it than he could help.” Edward S. Martin (1920–35), the founding editor of the Harvard Lampoon and a former State Department official, took on the job as Harper’s was reinventing itself yet again, leaving behind its more literary mode and evolving into a magazine “primarily of appraisal and critical inquiry.” He presented himself as “not a literary man,” and concerned his columns so much with questions of policy—whether on the follies of Prohibition or the question of what role the United States should play in the League of Nations—that one reader from Texas complained that he had “latterly become drowned or nearly so in criticisms, economics, and such like.” Martin gave way to the essayist and historian Bernard DeVoto (1935–55), in whom, Lapham wrote, “the magazine found the clearest expression of its purpose.” Stegner called him “precocious, alert, intelligent, brash, challenging, irreverent, literary, self-conscious, insecure, often ostentatiously crude, sometimes insufferable.” His friend and editor John Fischer, who would succeed him as Easy Chair columnist, remembered him as “a banty rooster from Utah who enjoyed a fight more than any man I ever knew.”

DeVoto’s job as a columnist, he wrote, was “to write about anything in American life that may interest me, but it is also to arrive at judgments under my own steam, independently of others.” An inveterate contrarian, his opinions were so strongly expressed that Stegner lamented that offended parties hadn’t learned “the trick of discounting him 20 per cent for rhetoric.” At various points he was called a communist (the Wyoming Cattlemen’s Association), a fascist (The Nation), and “a fool and a tedious and egotistical fool” (Sinclair Lewis).

Describing his ambitions for Harper’s, DeVoto once wrote,

It will dread solemnity as much as it dreads inaccuracy or propaganda. It will have leisure to enjoy the altogether unimportant and it will insist on handling even the weightiest subjects with a light touch.

His best columns hewed closely to this advice, as in his “Due Notice to the FBI” (October 1949), in which he excoriated the government’s growing anticommunist paranoia:

I like a country where it’s nobody’s damned business what magazine anyone reads, what he thinks, whom he has cocktails with. I like a country where we do not have to stuff the chimney against listening ears. . . . We had that kind of country only a little while ago and I’m for getting it back. It was a lot less scared than the one we’ve got now.

“If study and reflection have gone into it,” DeVoto said of the Easy Chair, “so have legwork, sweat, and the opinion that is based not on research but on experience and participation.” This spirit is perhaps most evident in his many groundbreaking pieces on conservation, among them a landmark article on the conspiracy to transfer public lands to states and ultimately into private hands—a story he stumbled upon by overhearing “a very loud and very drunk cattleman in the Range Riders Café in Miles City” while on a cross-country road trip with his wife.

DeVoto died in office—his final column accompanied by a note from the editors that the copy arrived on time, as it always had—and was followed by Fischer, the editor of Harper’s from 1953 to 1967. A gaunt, practical Westerner, Fischer had worked in military intelligence during the Second World War, as well as at numerous regional newspapers. (Later, he would write speeches for JFK.) His columns, like DeVoto’s, touched often on the environment and education and include inter alia a surprising endorsement of what might be called a precursor of the degrowth movement. But most vivid is an autobiographical piece recounting his mother’s time teaching in the Texas Panhandle at seventeen, when, faced with an insubordinate student her own age and twice her size, she took a piece of firewood from the Franklin stove and beat him into submission. Fischer had learned much from DeVoto, and in turn taught much to Lewis Lapham, who ultimately followed him as both a columnist and the editor.

As part of the magazine’s redesign in 1984, Lapham again put the Easy Chair in storage, replacing it with Notebook, which he called “a monthly reflection on the ways of the world, intended to acquaint the magazine’s readers with the presuppositions of its editor.” But though the name changed, the spirit remained largely the same. “Notebook was a speculation on whatever was then the current market in ideas,” wrote Lapham. “I was more interested in the wandering of the mind than in the harnessing of it to the bandwagons of social and political reform.” And if this description sells short the degree to which many of his columns were rooted in the same kind of skepticism and outrage one might have found in DeVoto’s, it’s true to the pleasures of Lapham’s Notebook—essays written on the model of Montaigne and, in their own way, overtures setting the stage for the issue that would follow. “The work never got easier,” Lapham remembered, “but neither did it lose its character as play.”

Since Notebook’s final appearance, in November 2010, the Easy Chair has returned, first in the hands of Thomas Frank, then in those of a rotation of writers, including Rebecca Solnit, the first woman to write the column on a regular basis. In much of their writing, one can begin to understand the nature of the work that, to DeVoto, was not important but indispensable: that even if that work ends up decaying at the bottom of the bay,

a historian knows that a lot of writing which has no caste mark on its forehead gets dumped in the bay too, and that he can count on finding bound files of Harper’s in library stacks. He has to use them; he cannot write history without them.

Perhaps this was why, at the end of his life, he wrote of the column, “In my private assignments it has always come first.”