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Harper's Magazine: A Survivor!
An American Album One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine
Edited by Lewis Lapham and Ellen Rosenbush Franklin Square Press. 712 Pages. $50.
The crowded racks on newsstands and the torrent of junk mail deliveries seeking subscribers testify to the superabundance of magazines being published in the United States. Some are even worth reading. The relative "old-timers" are a few decades old; some are mere infants facing high mortality rates. The journalistic landscape is littered with the bones of thousands of others, among them the esteemed monthlies Century, Scribners and McClure's, all long gone, and such once prosperous latecomers as Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Look and Colliers. How long before Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report drown in the cyberspace sea?
There are, though, two tough-- skinned survivors whose history dates back to before the Civil War. They are Harper's Magazine, which was launched in 1850, and The Atlantic Monthly, born in 1856. So this is Harper's 150th birthday year, a time for toasts and celebration. Without waiting for the rest of us to raise a glass, Harper's has done so itself, with a fat and handsome volume, an impressive taster's menu for each of the 15 decades the magazine has been nourishing people who care about good prose and intellectual protein-a devoted but, alas, small crowd.
A stylish and lively, if sometimes polemical, introduction by Lewis Lapham sets the table for the album's feast. Lapham was Harper's editor from 1975 to 1981, one of four editors during a turbulent few years in the magazine's history. He returned to the job in 1983 to restructure the magazine and pilot it into the 21st century. He and his collaborator Ellen Rosenbush must have labored long into the night to extract some 140 articles, short stories, and poems from 1,800 issues of Harper's and tailor them for this collection. Those who pick and choose among the pieces in "An American Album" (it is too heavy to be read in long sittings) should be grateful for their efforts.
After I became editor of The Atlantic in the 1960's I was struck by the number of people who confused The Atlantic with Harper's and vice...