Lewis Lapham, editor who revived Harper’s magazine, dies at 89

Lewis H. Lapham, the innovative editor who revived Harper’s magazine and penned books and essays that skewered the American upper class from which he sprang, died July 23 in Rome. He was 89.

His family confirmed the death but did not cite a specific cause.

Born into a family with a long history in statecraft and industry -- relatives included the secretary of war for Thomas Jefferson and a founder of what became the oil giant Texaco -- Lapham retained the aura of extreme privilege. On his tall, trim frame, he wore bespoke suits, accessorized with pocket squares and cuff links. He could often be found, drink in hand and chain-smoking Parliament cigarettes, at A-list galas and restaurants in New York.

At the same time, he positioned himself as an often-scornful observer of his own aristocratic heritage, leading to quips that he was “the Brahmin who got away.”

He aspired to be a historian and was studying the subject at the University of Cambridge when, in 1956, the Suez crisis broke out as well as the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary, and he found himself drawn to the thrill and immediacy of documenting history as it unfolded.

“I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting to do than to try to put words on paper,” he told the design and culture website Print, describing journalism as a form of public service and a “heroic” forum for ideas.

But by the time Lapham joined Harper’s as a contract writer in 1971 -- after assignments for Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post -- the venerable monthly founded in 1850 was losing readers and advertisers.

In a dispute with the owner over editorial direction and budgetary conflicts, the entire staff except for the art director followed the beloved top editor Willie Morris out the door, a mutiny that Lapham likened to “one of those Shakespeare plays where all the important people kill themselves.”

Although he had only been to the Harper’s office twice, Lapham was suddenly promoted to managing editor by the magazine’s owner, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Co., which had taken issue with Morris’s free-spending ways and articles like Norman Mailer’s 90,000-word report on a Vietnam War protest march.

Lapham turned the once reliably liberal Harper’s into what he called a “theater of ideas.” He published essays by leftists but also reached out to conservatives such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Ken Adelman. He ran articles questioning affirmative action and once put William F. Buckley Jr., the right-wing editor of the National Review, on the cover.

“What drew Lapham to these writers was his taste for heresy - he’s always loved starting fights on the playground and then bringing them back into the classroom,” media critic Jack Shafer wrote decades later in Slate. “Publishing contrary pieces gave Harper’s an ecumenical edge.”

Lapham, who became Harper’s top editor in 1976, also encouraged writers to provide their personal takes on U.S. politics, world affairs, science and the arts. He published some of Tom Wolfe’s most incendiary work, including “The Painted Word,” his 1975 attack on modern art, and was an early promoter of Annie Dillard’s meditative essays on nature.

“He pushed the idea that the memoir form might influence any piece -- an essay, report, investigation -- and make it more, rather than less, true,” Robert S. Boynton, head of the literary journalism program at New York University, told Smithsonian magazine. “He attacked the false gods of ‘objective journalism,’ and showed how much more artful and accurate writing in the first person could be.”

There were also blunders. Because he objected to the book’s many unnamed sources, Lapham refused to excerpt “All the President’s Men,” the soon-to-be bestseller by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward about the Watergate break-in that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.

What’s more, Harper’s continued to bleed cash. It was on the verge of closing in 1980 when it was bought by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the oil company Atlantic Richfield. The new owners set up a nonprofit foundation to underwrite the magazine.

The next year, the board reportedly pushed Lapham to resign in part because some found the magazine’s contents lacked liveliness and were too often harshly critical of American society. When his successor, Michael Kinsley, also left amid clashes with the board, Lapham was lured back in 1983 with a carte blanche mandate to redesign Harper’s.

“The board brought him back because the magazine started going downhill after he left, and they didn’t want to ruin the Harper’s brand,” said Samir Husni, a magazine industry analyst. Lapham, he added, “gave the magazine its identity.”

In his second stint as editor, Lapham tried to distinguish Harper’s from competitors, like the New Yorker and the Atlantic, by cutting back on windy articles and by inventing several short, eye-catching features.

The “Annotation” section deciphered random documents and images - a census form, a White House press release, a Carnegie Hall concert ticket - through critical comment and explanatory diagrams. “Harper’s Index” came about after Lapham noted that news stories were often built around numbers. He stripped away the words to produce a single page of numbers and unusual facts often juxtaposed to startle or amuse readers.

One Index entry dryly stated: “Pounds of plutonium and highly enriched uranium that are missing from U.S. inventories: 9,600 pounds. Pounds of plutonium needed to make an atomic bomb: 15.” Another put the number of “telephone-related injuries” in 1985 at 11,000. The Index was widely imitated and turned into a series of books.

Lapham filled out Harper’s with poetry, fiction, and in-depth reports, often by emerging voices such as David Foster Wallace, Christopher Hitchens and Fareed Zakaria. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled how a long lunch with Lapham led her to write two Harper’s essays on the struggles of America’s working class, and that formed the basis for her best-selling 2001 book “Nickel and Dimed.”

Lapham led off each edition of Harper’s with one of his own essays, written longhand with a Waterman pen, often about the abuse of privilege and power and the dangers facing America’s democracy.

Although the magazine continued to lose money, circulation nearly doubled to 220,000. Under his watch, Harper’s won the National Magazine Award, the industry’s highest honor, many times, including in 1995 for Lapham’s essays, which were praised for their “exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity.”

In 2007, a year after stepping down as editor of Harper’s, Lapham was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame. At the ceremony, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recalled seeing the patrician Lapham at the Manhattan literary hangout Elaine’s, confused by the stunning woman who appeared to be a model showering him with attention - until she learned he was editor of Harper’s, not Harper’s Bazaar.

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Into fortune born

Lewis Henry Lapham was born in San Francisco on Jan. 8, 1935. His father was in shipping and banking, and his paternal grandfather was mayor of San Francisco in the 1940s. As a boy, he sometimes rode with him in official limousines to ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

“I came to imagine,” he later observed, “that I was born to ride in triumph and that others, apparently less fortunate and more numerous, were born to stand smiling in the streets and wave their hats.”

His grandfather, also a high-stakes gambler, ultimately frittered away much of the family fortune, and Lapham described himself as someone “brought up with the attitude of somebody affluent, but without the funds.”

He graduated in 1952 from the private Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., and from Yale University in 1956 with an English degree. He then studied history at Cambridge but dropped out after six months. As he explained to the Kansas City Star, “I didn’t have the patience for footnotes, and I didn’t want to have to learn medieval German.”

Instead, he took a job in 1957 as a cub reporter for his hometown San Francisco Examiner, where his tasks included procuring bourbon for the better-known writers. Sent to cover a flower show, Lapham watched in horror as an editor cut his 4,000-word treatise down to a single paragraph.

After three years at the Examiner, followed by two more at the New York Herald Tribune, Lapham turned to magazine writing because he found traditional newspaper coverage too confining for his worldly tastes. One assignment for the Saturday Evening Post took him to India to write about the Beatles as they studied Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Four decades later, he detailed the experience in his book “With the Beatles.”

Survivors include his wife of more than 50 years, the former Joan Reeves, of Rome; three children, Andrew Lapham of Toronto, Delphina Boncompagni Ludovisi of Rome and Winston Lapham of Denver; and 10 grandchildren.

In addition to his regular presence on TV talk shows, Lapham introduced “America’s Century,” a six-part series for public television in 1989 that traced the sudden rise and eventual decline of American power in the 20th century. From 1988 to 1991, he hosted “Bookmark,” a weekly public TV program about new literature.

The focus of many of his own books -- he wrote 14, some of which were collections of his Harper’s columns -- was what he considered America’s obsession with wealth and material possessions, which he called a “civil religion.”

Several critics noted that such assertions were based more on personal observations than documentation. One reviewer of “Money and Class in America,” Richard Eder in the Los Angeles Times, described him as “Tom Wolfe without the legwork.”

His books and essays “all amount to pretty much the same contemptuous, Olympian jeremiad: The powers-that-be are craven and monstrous, American culture is vulgar and depraved, the U.S. is like imperial Rome, our democracy is dying or dead. All of which is arguably true,” wrote Kurt Andersen in New York magazine in 2005. “But, jeez, sometime tell me something I didn’t know, show a shred of uncertainty and maybe some struggle to suss out fresh truth.”

At age 72, in 2007, and with the financial support of wealthy friends like the chairman of Barnes & Noble, Lapham launched Lapham’s Quarterly, an erudite print counterpoint to what he considered the hyperactive pace and frivolous emphasis of internet culture.

Each issue examined one topic, such as love, war, politics or the family, through curated excerpts of the writings of great thinkers of the past. His goal was to infuse the wisdom of the likes of Aristotle, Thomas Paine, Simón Bolívar and Vaclav Havel into contemporary debates and to provide a springboard for discovery. (The magazine announced in late 2023 that, because of financial challenges, the print publication would be “on a temporary hiatus.”)

“Somebody comes across it and … goes from a smaller excerpt in the Quarterly to the whole work by Diderot,” Lapham told Smithsonian in 2012, referring to the French philosopher and encyclopedist. “The hope of social or political change stems from language that induces a change of heart. That’s the power of words, and that’s a different power than the power of the internet.”