The Education of Lewis Lapham

This engaging memoir, assembled with precision from Lewis Lapham’s extensive archive, tells the story of an editor, essayist, and political journalist distinguished by his erudition, elegance and, above all, originality.

Born in 1935 in San Francisco, Lapham was raised in opulent privilege in the city’s Pacific Heights neighborhood. His great grandfather was a founder of the oil giant Texaco and his grandfather served as mayor of San Francisco; he also counted among his ancestors Henry Dearborn, Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of war.

With the family fortune having been largely dissipated by war and carelessness, Lewis embarked on earning a living in journalism. After stints as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco and New York, and as a feature writer for The Saturday Evening Post—for which he covered the Johnson White House and the Beatles’ journey to Rishikesh, India—he became editor of Harper's Magazine in 1976, a position he held for nearly 30 years.

Described by Kurt Vonnegut as “without doubt America’s greatest satirist,” Lapham turned the privilege of his own background into a vantage point for a coruscating critique of the fecklessness and superficiality of what he called the “equestrian class.” Under his tenure, Harper’s was widely celebrated for its wit and evisceration of an American ruling class that Lewis, drawing on a deep knowledge of ancient history and classical literature, regularly compared to those who oversaw the collapse of the Roman empire.

Among the writers Lewis championed in the pages of Harper’s, and who populate this delightfully readable memoir, are Annie Dillard, Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, David Foster Wallace, Christopher Hitchens, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Marilynne Robinson.

In 2006 Lapham left Harper’s and founded Lapham’s Quarterly, which became acclaimed for putting current events into conversation with history.