Lewis H. Lapham was a writer and editor best known for his long tenure as editor of Harper’s Magazine, as well as for his own publication, Lapham’s Quarterly.
Lewis H. Lapham’s ebroa
San Francisco-born Lewis H. Lapham wanted to be a historian, but when the Suez crisis arose in 1956, he was drawn to journalism instead, taken in by the idea of documenting history as it happened. Educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and Yale University, Lapham began to pursue the career as a journalist and essayist that would define his legacy, his reporting appearing in newspapers like the San Francisco Examiner and New York Herald Tribune.
His most notable leap came in 1971, when he began writing for Harper’s Magazine. Once a mainstay among American readers, the monthly publication was on the verge of failing by the time he came on board. He was made managing editor, then, in 1976, its top editor, helping to reinvigorate Harper’s pages with new life, remaking it into one of the most respected periodicals of his era. Even with a two-year departure in the ‘80s, Lapham ended up being an institution at the magazine until 2006, when he established his own publication, Lapham’s Quarterly.
In 1989, Lapham also wrote and hosted the acclaimed six-part PBS series, “America’s Century,” which detailed the prior 100 years of U.S. history. He also wrote 15 books between 1980 and 2016, many of them essay collections.
Lapham led Harper’s to multiple National Magazine Award wins, among many other honors, plus earned the Gerald Loeb Award for Magazines. He was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2007.
Notable quote
“The internet works against historical consciousness because the new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that it buries all thought of what happened yesterday or the day before in an avalanche of data. The more data we possess, the less we know what it means.” — Interview with The Paris Review, 2019
