From the Archive Archives

Striking Out

From “Hollywood on the Line,” which appeared in the January 1984 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 173-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive. Union politics…

Between Tact and Force

by Jack Black,

From “What’s Wrong with the Right People?,” which appeared in the June 1929 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 173-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.…

A Monopoly of Violence

by Nicholas Von Hoffman,

From “Contract Killers,” which appeared in the June 2004 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 173-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive. A small group of…

Mists of Wish and Dream

by Lewis H. Lapham,

From the Editor’s Notebook that appeared in the June 1988 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 173-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive. The news from…

In the Atrium of Kings

by Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé,

Let us follow a Cossack seigneur who is going by way of the Volga to his domains in the steppe of the Don. We are seeking picturesque representations of national…

A Galaxy of Authority

by H.G. Wells,

My particular line of country has always been generalization and synthesis. I dislike isolated events and disconnected details. I hate statements, views, prejudices, and beliefs that jump at you out…

The Upper Crust

by William Tucker,

I was getting awfully suspicious of environmentalists. Their solutions to problems had an inordinate amount of impracticality about them, more than they would have tolerated in their own lives, and…

The Revolution of the Youth

by Walter Karp,

In the last two years of his brief and stormy life, Robert Kennedy showed a remarkable ability to arouse extravagant political hopes. California grape-pickers came to look upon him as…

Ugliness and Tension

by John Fischer,

The question for the arriving generation is not whether our society is imperfect (we can take that for granted), but how to deal with that imperfection. So far as I…

The Mournful Observer

by Erwin Chargaff,

It is my impression that the modern phase of science and of scholarship began with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Here exploring and exploiting became synonymous, and the collection of…

The New Despair

by Midge Decter,

An American adult today has, in his ordinary lifetime, virtually spanned ages. His mind and imagination have been confronted with the demand that they make room for five traditional lifetimes’…

The Monroe Fantasy

by T.D. Allman,

At stake was more than some Caribbean island. America itself, one elder statesman informed the president, faced a crucial test “in the great struggle between liberty and despotism.” Would the…

Voluntarily and For Pay

by David Foster Wallace,

I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100…

They Will See It Coming

by Betty Friedan,

This is the story of two scientists. Their search began five years ago with a single radiocarbon clue from the ocean floor. It led over many continents and seas, to…

The Reading Public

by Hugh Kenner,

I heard about a rejection letter recently that deserves preservation in these days of big-time word-merchandising. “I cannot recall reading,” it said without irony, “a novel as learned, as intelligent,…

On the Skids

by Edward Hoagland,

What do most of us do when we notice a hungry, disoriented person slumped on the street in obvious despair? Why, we pass quickly by, averting our eyes toward an…

The Wraith of Order

by Maxwell Struthers Burt,

In the beginning, when I first went West, I thought it was because I was in love with loneliness. Love of a certain kind of life and a certain kind…

Death Is for Suckers

by Lewis H. Lapham,

Funeral Pyre, by Rockwell Kent © Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York. Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund from the Carl…

Every Beast of the Earth

by Joy Williams,

St. Francis once converted a wolf to reason. The wolf of Gubbio promised to stop terrorizing an Italian town; he made pledges and assurances and pacts, and he kept his…

The Enchanted Circle

by Fitz Hugh Ludlow,

I have just returned from forty-eight hours’ attendance at a bedside. My patient was a gentleman of forty who for eight years has habitually taken opium. He first learned its…

Private Matters

by Paul Bender,

It is often said that our Constitution is alive. As the Supreme Court reinterprets the law in different eras, our rights both grow and diminish—sometimes with glacial slowness, sometimes with…

The Wicked Abroad

by Charles Austin Beard,

In Henry IV, the king on his deathbed gives his son and heir the ancient advice dear to the hearts of rulers in dire straits at home: I . .…

Manhattan Magic

by Robert Shackleton,

The incongruity is the fascination of it all. In New York, the most modern of all large cities, the very embodiment of twentieth-century youth, thrives superstition, gray with countless centuries…

Made, Not Begotten

by Loren C. Eiseley,

This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the great age, make no mistake about it; the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with…

Dreamland

by Mark Twain,

I once awoke from a dream while crossing Bond Street in New York with a friend, and it was snowing hard. We had been talking, and there had been no…

The Other Side of the Coin

by Louis Bagger,

The entrance to Castle Garden was blocked up with vehicles, peddlers of cheap cigars, apple stands, and runners from the boarding houses and intelligence offices that abound in the neighborhood…

The Good Citizen

by William Dean Howells,

“I have just had a gratifying illustration of the conscientious perfection of the American people in enacting and enforcing a law when they are agreed that it is really for…

Life Is a Box of Chocolates

by Cornelia Stratton Parker,

Wise heads tell us we act first, or decide to act first, and reason afterward. What could be put down in black and white as to why we took up…

Grand Illusion

by Paul Fussell,

I’ve given the Second World War a uniformly bad press, rejecting all attempts to depict it as a sensible proceeding or to mitigate its cruelty and swinishness. I have rubbed…

The Space Coast

by Anthony Haden-Guest,

We have perhaps created too much history too quickly—more than we can cope with. We know the cycles: birth, growth, glory, degeneration. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first…

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