Lewis H. Lapham

Lewis H. Lapham (1935–2024) served as editor of Harper’s Magazine from 1976 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 2006. His first Easy Chair columns were published in the early 1970s, and he wrote them with greater frequency beginning in 1976. After first leaving the editorship, he took a break from the column, but picked it up again in 1984, retitling it Notebook and publishing it on a monthly basis until 2010. Notebook won the National Magazine Award in 1995 for exhibiting “an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity,” and in 2002 it received the Thomas Paine Journalism Award. In 2007, after his retirement from Harper’s, he founded Lapham’s Quarterly, which he also edited. He was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame that same year. Lapham remained editor emeritus at Harper’s Magazine until his death in 2024.

Lapham led the Harper’s redesign in 1984, which included the creation of the Index, Annotations, and Readings sections, following his acknowledgment that the magazine “knows not nearly enough about what its first editors described as ‘the varied intellectual movements of this most stirring and productive age.’” Harper’s would thenceforth provide “texts meant to incite acts of the imagination rather than facilitate the transfers of data, not to provide ready-made answers but to say, in effect, look at this, see how much more beautiful and strange and full of possibility is the world than can be dreamed of by the mythographers at NBC and Time.”

Lapham also wrote for Life, Commentary, National Review, Elle, Forbes, The American Spectator, Golf Digest, Maclean’s, the London Observer, and the New York Times, among other publications. Lapham’s numerous books include Waiting for the Barbarians (1997), Theater of War (2002), Gag Rule (2004), Pretensions to Empire (2006), and, most recently, Age of Folly (2016). He was also the host of the podcast The World in Time, first at Bloomberg and later at Lapham’s Quarterly. The New York Times likened him to H. L. Mencken; Vanity Fair suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe compared him to Michel de Montaigne.