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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
In my seventeenth year, there suddenly appeared in Fifth Avenue a very small canary-yellow brougham with dark trimmings, drawn by a big, high-stepping bay and driven by a coachman who…
We engage in political activity so that we may, as societies of men, deal with the world as it is. This is not a slight endeavor; the world as it…
commenced in February. It was over the Voie Sacrée that the gallant Twentieth Corps — the corps d’attaque that has been used as the drivingwedge in every big assault since…
The main current of Zionism has always nourished itself on the illusions that the Jews were “a people without a land” returning to “a land without a people.” But there…
To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires…
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years…
Tuesday, June 6. I turned on the radio for the eight a.m. news. The announcer spoke about special warnings which had been broadcast to our Allies in Western Europe. There…