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Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Lewis Lapham Papers; Box and Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library
The materials in this collection span a sixty-year period in the life of Lewis Lapham whose half century as editor of Harper's Magazine and Lapham's Quarterly runs parallel to his career as America's foremost essayist on the subject of power, wealth, and class. Called by Kurt Vonnegut "our greatest satirist", Lapham entered the newspaper industry in 1960 as a journalist for the San Francisco Examiner and New York Herald Tribune, soon contributing feature articles to the Saturday Evening Post where, under the mentorship of editor Otto Friedrich, he developed a trenchant, even-tempered style of reportage, one eschewing the fashionable, overheated tropes of New Journalism. Lapham's observational prose lent his writing a documentary acuity, rendering his larger-than-life subjects (Thelonious Monk, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller, The Beatles) with a sense of scale commensurate to the epoch which produced them.
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