When I was growing up in the 1960s, I was taught by the adult world that good girls never had sex and bad girls did. This rule had clarity going…

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I was chief inmate clerk at a prison housing nearly three thousand convicts, and it was part of my duty to keep an up-to-the-minute record of the inmate population. When…

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He is perhaps the best speaker in America of this generation, but his speech before the huge crowd in the U.N. Plaza on that afternoon in mid-April was bad; his…

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Only once have we elected a really ignorant man to the Presidency. Andrew Jackson was almost completely innocent of book-learning when he came to the White House. Furthermore, he was…

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The illicit attraction of the lowly carp

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While tramping through the Daniel Boone National Forest, it is not unusual to come across a family cemetery — stones broken, names faded — or the foundations of a house,…

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I n every city there is a district which is called “tough” — a district which decent people, afraid of insult or theft, shun in both daylight and darkness. It…

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If we were writing for a prince with ready millions at command, we might take Lord Bacon’s estimate, and say that thirty acres are not too much for a prince-like…

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For several hundred years, no matter who was fighting or what kind of warfare was being waged, a truce was always proclaimed throughout the land at the time of the…

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Several days after I arrived in Havana I asked my host why all the toilet seats were missing. “We don’t use them here,” he replied, as if it were an…

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When we are asked if we like children, we are used to saying that it depends upon the child; that we like some children, just as we like some grown…

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I never knew just when I passed the border into Germany because no frontier official stopped me. I thought it odd that there should be a border warfare so recently…

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In 1930 we went to live in Sweden. Before we had unpacked, and while I was still in that baffled mood that always comes on me when forced to tackle…

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The fox at last felt the necessity of a run for his life, for he mounted the bluff, stopped a moment to breathe the fresh air, and chose his course…

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The picketing had not been stopped when we arrived in Sioux City. We had come through Indiana and Illinois into Iowa. In two days we had not passed through wild…

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Why is the Universe as it is and not something else? Why is the Universe here at all? It is true that at present we have no clue to the…

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All the way, at odd times, far off, with neither sense nor sequence, the guns have sounded almost like the noises of peace — blasting or pile-driving. Now, outside the…

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Before the invention of the electric telegraph enabled man to outrival the boast of Shakespeare’s Puck that he would “put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes,” the…

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How well I remember him — the tall, grave, slightly bent figure, the head like Plato’s or that of Diogenes, peering, all too kindly, into the faces of dishonest men,…

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I found my first Ragged School, in an obscure place called West-Street, Saffron-Hill, pitifully struggling for life, under every disadvantage. If I say it is ten years ago, I leave…

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by a School-Teacher

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This vague put-upon feeling had been bothering me for some time, but only recently did I finally realize that I’m just one victim of a vast conspiracy. Chances are that…

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Tommy, Beauty, and Baby had set up a harmonious household when a pet store offered an irresistible bargain in the form of an additional pair of young marmosets that nobody…

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from the archive 50 years ago in Harper’s Magazine Literary history and the present are dark with silences: the years-long silences of acknowledged greats; the ceasing to publish after one…

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From “Voyage Alone in the Rob Roy,” which appeared in the May 1868 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete essay — along with the magazine’s entire 164-year archive — is available online at harpers.org/fromthearchive.

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Scarcely four years have passed since workers at the Vega plant in Lordstown, Ohio, went out on strike, not for more money or shorter hours, but to protest the pressure…

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Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call “cowburnt.” Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you…

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Influenza does not rate with the public as a terrifying disease. One might start a panic any time by shouting “smallpox!” or “yellow fever!” in a crowd, but can you…

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