Page 2 | Harper's Magazine

Nobody Knows

When I was eighteen, I spent several months working as a bus girl at a diner. It was a cheerful-looking place, facing San Francisco Bay. The kitchen was L-shaped: the…

Village People

by Terry Southern,

By Terry Southern (1924–95), from an unpublished manuscript written in 1952. It is included in Making It Hot for Them, a collection of his writings edited by Nile Southern that…

Lynx on the Shore of Loon Lake, Near Wanapitei, Ontario, Canada, July 1902 (detail)

by George Shiras,

American Women

by Pearl S. Buck,

I am an American woman but I had no opportunity until a few years ago to know women in America. Living as I did in China, it is true that…

Song and Dance

by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Witold Szabłowski,

By Witold Szablowski, from Dancing Bears, a book of reportage that will be published next month by Penguin Books. Szab?owski is a journalist. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Please Clap

by Diana Bates, Ling Yuan,

From descriptions of audience applause recorded in official transcriptions of speeches by Nicolae Ceausescu. They were included in a blog post published last year by Yuan Ling, a journalist. The…

Higher Yearning

by Flannery O’Connor,

From a journal that Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) kept during her second year at Georgia State College for Women. The journal entries were published in Issue 94 of Image Journal. Regina…

Modern Despots

by Aldous Huxley,

In a democratic state any propagandist will have rivals competing with him for the support of the public. In totalitarian states there is no liberty of expression for writers and…

On the Corner of Myth and Main

by Walter Kirn,

There was a time when I didn’t know that I lived in Middle America. When I was very young, growing up in eastern Minnesota, I thought I was just an…

Before I Sleep

by Henry Marsh,

By Henry Marsh, from Admissions, a memoir about his life as a neurosurgeon. The book was published in October by St. Martin’s Press. Marsh is the author of Do No Harm.

From The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. The book was published last month by the University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Scholem, and Walter Benjamin were German-born Jewish philosophers.…

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2,052

20th century

Nobody Knows

Village People

Lynx on the Shore of Loon Lake, Near Wanapitei, Ontario, Canada, July 1902 (detail)

American Women

Song and Dance

Please Clap

Higher Yearning

Modern Despots

On the Corner of Myth and Main

Before I Sleep

Document of Barbarism

Debug

20th century

From the Archive

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Nobody Knows

Village People

Lynx on the Shore of Loon Lake, Near Wanapitei, Ontario, Canada, July 1902 (detail)

American Women

Song and Dance

Please Clap

Higher Yearning

Modern Despots

On the Corner of Myth and Main

Before I Sleep

Document of Barbarism

December 2017

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