Lewis H. Lapham at work in the offices of Harper’s Magazine. Photograph by Matthew Septimus
We at Harper’s Magazine mourn the loss of our editor emeritus, Lewis H. Lapham (1935–2024), who died on July 23 in Rome. A dear friend and colleague for over half a century, Lapham ran the magazine for nearly three decades, serving as editor from 1976 to 1981 and from 1983 to 2006, and regularly contributed columns and essays that were compared to the work of Michel de Montaigne, Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken.
“What so annoys people about the media,” Lapham once wrote, “is not its rudeness or its stupidity but its sanctimony.” His life and career, at Harper’s and later at Lapham’s Quarterly, were distinguished by a different approach, not to produce a magazine that would clothe readers “with opinions in the way that Halston or Bloomingdale’s dresses them for the opera,” but rather one that would aim “to ask questions, not to provide ready-made answers, to say, in effect, look at this, see how much more beautiful and strange and full of possibility is the world than can be imagined by the mythographers at Time or NBC.”
In 1984, Lapham introduced the iconic Harper’s Index, Readings, and the Annotation, journalistic forms that recognized the time constraints modern readers faced amid the flood of information in the electronic age. This redesign remains the foundation of the magazine to this day, and Lapham’s editorial sensibility continues to guide our work. Lapham was the author of Money and Class in America (1988), which was described by Kurt Vonnegut as the work of “without doubt our greatest satirist.” Many of Lapham’s columns were collected in numerous books, such as Waiting for the Barbarians (1997), Theater of War (2003), Gag Rule (2004), Pretensions to Empire (2006), and, most recently, Age of Folly (2016). After his retirement from Harper’s, he founded Lapham’s Quarterly in 2007, and he was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame.
We will commemorate Lapham’s life and legacy in the coming weeks and months.
Lapham’s work for Harper’s is collected here. A selection:
“Alaska” (May 1970)
“The Pleasures of Reading” (May 1975)
“In the American Grain” (February 1984)
“A Pig for All Seasons” (June 1986)
“Magic Mountain” (May 1998)
“Swiss Pastry” (June 1998)
“Drums Along the Potomac” (November 2001)
“The Road to Babylon” (October 2002)
“The Case for Impeachment” (March 2006)
“Blue Guitar” (May 2006)
“Elegy for a Rubber Stamp” (September 2008)
“Figures of Speech” (November 2010)
