Lewis H. Lapham, the former Harper’s magazine editor whose own writing interrogated class and culture in America, has died at 89, the Washington Post reports.
Lapham was born in San Francisco; his grandfather, Roger Lapham, was mayor of the city from 1944 to 1948. He was educated at Yale University, and worked as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Herald Tribune before becoming a writer, and then managing editor of Harper’s.
In 1976, he was promoted to editor of Harper’s, and stayed in the position until 1981, when the magazine’s board pushed him out. He was rehired in 1983, and stepped down in 2006. The next year, he launched a new magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly.
Lapham wrote or edited more than a dozen books, including Money and Class in America, The Wish for Kings, Hotel America, and Gag Rule. His most recent book, Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy, was published in 2016.
Lapham’s admirers paid tribute to him on social media. On the platform X, New York Times book critic Jennifer Szalai wrote, “I remember my first experience reading Harper’s, and realizing there was nothing else like it: wryly funny, deadly serious, slyly knowing at times but relentlessly curious about the world, too. The same could be said for the inimitable Lewis. RIP.”
And author Joyce Carol Oates posted, “A brilliant prose stylist. Pure Enlightenment intelligence, at (eloquently ironic) odds with the debased T***p DarkAge: Lewis Lapham.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
