Lapham, Lewis H. 1935-

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LAPHAM, Lewis H. 1935-

(Lewis Henry Lapham)

PERSONAL: Born January 8, 1935, in San Francisco, CA; son of Lewis Abbot (a banker) and Jane (Foster) Lapham; married Joan Brooke Reeves, August 10, 1972; children: Lewis Anthony Polk, Elizabeth Sophia, Winston Peale. Education: Yale University, B.A., 1956; additional study at Cambridge University, 1956–57.

ADDRESSES: Office—Harper's, 666 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

CAREER: San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco, CA, reporter, 1957–60; New York Herald Tribune, New York, NY, reporter, 1960–62; Saturday Evening Post, New York, NY, writer, 1963–67; Life, New York, NY, writer, 1968–70; Harper's Magazine, New York, NY, managing editor, 1971–75, editor, 1975–81, 1983–. Host and moderator of weekly public television program focusing on current books, Bookmark, 1988–91; host of PBS series America's Century; frequent guest on television and radio talk shows. Visiting professor of writing at Yale University. Trustee of New School for Social Research and Louis B. Mayer Foundation; member of board of directors, Libraries for the Future and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation; chair of board of directors, The Americans for Libraries Council; member of advisory council, New School University.

MEMBER: Council on Foreign Relations, Yale Club, Century Club (New York, NY), Coffee House Club, National Golf Links.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Magazine Awards, 1994, for fiction, feature writing, and essays, all for contributions to Harper's magazine; National Magazine Award, 1995, for commentary; LL.D., Hampden-Sydney College.

WRITINGS:

Fortune's Child: A Portrait of the United States as Spendthrift Heir, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1980.

(Editor) High Technology and Human Freedom, Smithsonian (Washington, DC), 1986.

(Compiler, with Michael Pollan and Eric Etheridge; and author of introduction) The Harper's Index Book, Holt (New York, NY), 1987.

Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on Our Civil Religion, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1988.

Imperial Masquerade, Grove-Weidenfeld (New York, NY), 1990.

(Editor) Walter Karp, Buried Alive: Essays on Our Endangered Republic, Franklin Square Press (New York, NY), 1992.

The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay, Grove (New York, NY), 1993.

Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siècle, Verso (New York, NY), 1996.

Waiting for the Barbarians, Verso (New York, NY), 1997.

Lapham's Rules of Influence: A Careerist's Guide to Success, Status, and Self-Congratulation, Random House (New York, NY), 1999.

The Agony of Mammon: The Imperial World Economy Explains Itself to the Membership in Davos, Switzerland, Verso (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor, with Peter T. Struck) The End of the World, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor, with Ellen Rosenbush) An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine, Franklin Square Press (New York, NY), 2000.

(And narrator) Legacy of a Kidnapping: The Triumph of the Tabloids (video presentation), California Newsreel (San Francisco, CA), 2000.

Lights, Camera, Democracy!, At Random (New York, NY), 2001.

Theater of War, New Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Thirty Satires, New Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy, Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2004.

With the Beatles, Melville House Publishing (Hoboken, NJ), 2005.

Author of foreword, California: The Great Exception, by Carey McWilliams, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1999. Contributor to periodicals, including Life, National Review, Commentary, Yale Literary Magazine, Elle, Fortune, Forbes, American Spectator, Vanity Fair, Travel and Leisure Golf, Golf Digest, Parade, Maclean's, London Observer, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times. Author of syndicated newspaper column, 1981–87; author of monthly column, "Notebook," for Harper's Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS: Lewis H. Lapham is considered by many readers and peers to be among this country's most gifted, insightful, and respected journalists. From the beginning of his career as reporter for the San Francisco Examiner to his post as editor of Harper's magazine, Lapham has investigated and interpreted many elements of contemporary American life. Dedicated to his profession, he has earned a reputation as a serious social critic, attempting to uncover dishonesty and corruption on all levels in order to reveal the truth and hopefully provoke thought and action in his readers.

Over the years, Lapham's articles and columns have provided readers with comprehensive and timely commentary. The list of issues he has tackled is extensive, ranging from environmentalism, conservation of energy, federal aid to the arts, and quality higher education, to politics and politicians, the spoiled upper classes, and a discussion of Black leaders and role models. Lapham "is an author of style, with deliberations expressed in gracefully conceived prose," according to Robert Dahlin in Publishers Weekly. A reviewer for the Atlantic stated, "Lapham brings formidable weapons to social criticism: wit, learning, a wide association with the people of privilege who are his chief subjects—and a journalist's nose for corruption." Mary Huhn added in Mediaweek that Lapham "has been around the journalistic block, and thus has a perspective uncommon among magazine editors, which tend to be young. He has seen substantive changes in the way issues become issues."

Once asked by CA why he decided to become a journalist, Lapham joked: "I thought I was both a novelist manqué and a historian manqué. Journalism allowed me to write as I would like to do; it was the third best." He began his career at the San Francisco Examiner and moved to the New York Herald Tribune in 1960. After having some success as a syndicated newspaper columnist, he next went on to monthly magazines, serving as editor of Harper's for nearly three decades. In 1983, Lapham was given carte blanche to re-design Harper's, and he did so with his modern readership in mind. "We live in a world in which we must compete with television and all of the other possible uses of time that are available to people," he once told CA. "I don't say it's a good or bad thing; I just think it happens to be part of the condition in which we live. You can regret it; you can wish it weren't true and that you lived in a world where people still wrote heroic couplets and read Dickens. But that's not the kind of world we live in. On the other hand, writing, to my mind, is still the finest form of expression. If you're faced with a readership that doesn't have very much time, you have to be sure that what you get into their hands is worth their trouble."

Lapham's first book, Fortune's Child: A Portrait of the United States as Spendthrift Heir, is a collection of thirty-one of Lapham's previously published articles and columns. The theme behind this assortment of essays is that modern American life is in societal disrepair as a result of our nation's obsession with money, power, and material possessions. James Sloan Allen noted that Lapham credits "the hegemony of money" as the cause of America's state of "societal disrepair." Allen explained in the Saturday Review that Lapham's writings mirror his feeling that as "the inheritors of Western civilization's economic and cultural capital, Americans have felt no need to contribute substantively to it and have instead indulged themselves in the revelries of aimless affluence, cultural frivolity, and selfish competition for pieces of the patrimony. In consequence, Americans of all types have lost respect for both past and future and have banished from their lives the energies of will and imagination that nourish culture."

In 1988 Lapham published Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on a Civil Religion, a book that explores many of the themes found in his first book. Lapham explained his thoughts about writing Money and Class in America in a Publishers Weekly interview: "We need to realize that money is not the ultimate power of the world. It is not money itself, but the love of money that is the root of all evil. If you let this love blot out courage, work, art, romance—then you are closing yourself into a narrower and narrower cage…. I am not a prophet, but I do believe we need to get out from under this fear, to reconnect with ideas and spiritual values—that will be our saving grace."

Lapham intends to be controversial, and not surprisingly his views are sometimes met with a hostile response. In the conservative magazine National Review, Hilton Kramer panned Lapham's Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siècle as "tiresome … yet another flatulent attempt to be amusing about serious matters that are beyond his capacity to take seriously." The reviewer went on to label Lapham "a patrician snob who has somehow wandered into the wrong vocation and doesn't yet understand that the joke is on him." Interestingly enough, Hotel America was released the year after Harper's won all of the prestigious National Magazine Awards, including the one for essays and criticism.

Lapham was inspired to write Lapham's Rules of Influence: A Careerist's Guide to Success, Status, and Self-Congratulation by his experiences with young people, who, he said, "ask for introductions to Woody Allen and the doorman at Balthazar, about the hope of meeting Peter Jennings and the name of the restaurant where the editors of the Conde Nast magazines go expensively to lunch." Alex Kuczynski declared in the New York Times Book Review that Lapham's "treatisecum-satirical self-help manual … not only illustrates why most Americans—especially young ones—are going to hell but tells them how to get there." The critic suggested, "The offense [Lapham] will cause to some media hotheads is purely delightful…. Lapham obviously knows his material, and his yes men and social climbers. Which makes you wonder: what pretentious bunch of jerks has he been hanging out with?" Booklist correspondent David Rouse concluded of Lapham's Rules of Influence: "Every page of Lapham's compact, acerbic guide contains a delight!"

Several of Lapham's books consist of editorials and other materials he originally wrote for Harper's. For instance, Theatre of War "comes out doing the sarcastic equivalent of swinging in this collection of diatribes against incompetent hypocrisy in the media and government," observed a Publishers Weekly reviewer. In pieces originally published in the magazine's "Notebook" column, Lapham criticizes American politics, U.S. foreign policy, and other aspects of government, media, and culture. Thirty Satires contains thirty pieces covering about twenty years of American "political and cultural folly," commented a Publishers Weekly critic. He covers topics such as the Kennedy family as "American royalty," the making of a major motion picture, the Contract with America, Steve Forbes's ill-fated political candidacy, and more. "Reading one Lapham piece after another is shock therapy for the intellect, exposing all that is flabby and sentimental," remarked Shelley Cox in the Library Journal. The Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that "satire requires only that vice and absurdity be held up to contempt and ridicule, both of which Lapham supplies in erudite abundance."

An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine, edited by Lapham and Ellen Rosenbush, offers a thorough assortment of poems, stories, essays, and articles that have appeared in Harper's since about 1850. "Grouped by decade, this astounding array of literature reads like a history of the U.S.," commented Booklist reviewer Ilene Cooper. Along with Horace Greeley's descriptions of crossing the American plains and "going west" are essays by Leon Trotsky describing Hitler, Seymour Hersh breaking the story of the My Lai massacre during Vietnam, and first-person accounts of Civil War battles. Literary presences include Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, Jack London, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Eudora Welty. "In a volume overflowing with riches, Lapham's sesquicentennial selections vividly form a mosaic portrait of the American experience," observed a Publishers Weekly contributor.

Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy also had its genesis in a number of shorter Lapham pieces in Harper's. The book contains "stinging criticisms and scathing indictments of the Bush administration and its supporters" on their failure to justify the invasion of Iraq, repeated episodes of outright deception of the American people, and their pernicious attempts to silence dissent on the administration's policies and actions, particularly the Patriot Act. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called it "literate, sophisticated, and plenty ticked-off: vintage Lapham, and a ringing endorsement of First Amendment freedoms."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

America's Intelligence Wire, February 13, 2004, Graham Roth, "Darthmouth College: Interview: Lewis Lapham on American Greatness."

Atlantic, April 16, 1980, review of Fortune's Child: A Portrait of the United States as Spendthrift Heir, p. 126.

Booklist, May 15, 1999, David Rouse, review of Lapham's Rules of Influence: A Careerist's Guide to Success, Status, and Self-Congratulation, p. 1647; April 15, 2000, Ilene Cooper, review of An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine, p. 1515; October 15, 2000, Candace Smith, review of video Legacy of a Kidnapping: Lindbergh and the Triumph of the Tabloids, p. 466; June 1, 2004, Alan Moores, review of Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy, p. 1678.

Columbia Journalism Review, July, 2000, James Boylan, review of An American Album, p. 71.

Entertainment Weekly, July 23, 1999, review of Lapham's Rules of Influence, p. 62.

Interview, February, 1989, Jeff Giles, "Roundtable Revisited," p. 30.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2004, review of Gag Rule, p. 377.

Library Journal, March 15, 2000, Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., review of An American Album, p. 86; December, 2003, Shelley Cox, review of Thirty Satires, p. 133; July, 2004, Bob Nardini, review of Gag Rule, p. 103.

Mediaweek, May 2, 1994, Mary Huhn, "Lapham the Journalist," profile of Lewis Lapham, p. 16.

National Review, December 31, 1995, Hilton Kramer, review of Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siècle, p. 42;; September 13, 2004, "Lewis Lapham, the Editor of Harper's, Has an Essay in Its September Issue on Conservatives," p. 15.

Newsweek, February 29, 1988, David Gates, review of Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on Our Civil Religion, p. 69.

New York Times Book Review, June 27, 1999, Alex Kuczynski, "Bootlicking for Dummies: Lewis Lapham on the Importance of Being Obsequious," review of Lapham's Rules of Influence, p. 13.

Publishers Weekly, January 11, 1980, Robert Dahlin, interview with Lewis Hapham, p. 12; February 5, 1988, Neil Baldwin, "Lewis Lapham; the Editor of Harpers's Magazine Has Written a Scathing Indictment of Americans' Attitudes toward Money and Class," interview with Lewis Lapham; p. 75; April 19, 1993, review of The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay, p. 44; March 27, 2000, review of An American Album, p. 65; September 9, 2002, review of Theater of War, p. 57; October 7, 2002, review of Theater of War, p. 22; September 15, 2003, review of Thirty Satires, p. 53; May 10, 2004, review of Gag Rule, p. 48.

Saturday Review, March 15, 1980, James Sloan Allen, review of Fortune's Child, p. 40.

School Library Journal, January, 2001, Mary Mueller, review of Legacy of a Kidnapping, p. 68.

Spectator, March 15, 2003, William Boot, "Lewis Lapham, the East Coast Brahmin Who Edits Harper's Magazine, Attacks Michael Ignatieff with Some Gusto in the Latest Issue," p. 11.

Writer's Digest, November, 1980, Hayes B. Jacobs, "Harper's: Back to Work," p. 16.