Lewis Lapham’s influence on the shape of the American magazine through his work at Harper’s can hardly be overstated. Many tributes have been written to this effect in the past few days, and I suspect many more will be written in the weeks and months to come as all the little eminences of American literary life crawl out to draw their lines of connection to the great man. Lapham was like a liberal William F. Buckley, in that he cultivated, through his magazine, a sensibility whose influence emanated far beyond its pages. But unlike Buckley, who with National Review gave his readers politics, Lapham only sought to suggest an approach to politics (and to life more generally). His sensibility was that of the genial skeptic. And, as he wrote in a 1984 manifesto, with Harper’s he aimed “to ask questions, not to provide ready-made answers, to say, in effect, look at this, see how much more beautiful and strange and full of possibility is the world than can be imagined by the mythographers at Time or NBC.”
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