Lapham's Quarterly Returns in Summer 2025

Prologue to our next chapter

In 2018, six years before his death, on the tenth anniversary of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lewis Lapham recognized that time was catching up with him. Anxious that his namesake magazine survive him, he began enlisting writers to serve as co-editors. A veteran of Lapham’s editorial staff at Harper’s Magazine, I was the first writer to whom he offered this assignment, and I happily accepted it, writing the preamble for the Summer 2018 issue, Water. The second writer he invited was Francine Prose, who co-edited our Winter 2019 issue, Night, as well as the Summer 2020 issue, Epidemic, and the Spring 2021 issue, Friendship.

Also taking turns as co-editor were, in chronological order, David Wootton, Ron Rosenbaum, Simon Winchester, Paul Tough, and Curtis White, who introduced the Spring 2023 issue, Freedom, the last to appear in print prior to the publishing hiatus announced in the fall of 2023. When that hiatus began, the Quarterly’s editors had finished work on what was supposed to have been Volume XV, Number 2, devoted to the topic of Energy, the last issue that Lewis Lapham edited, at age eighty-eight. They had also nearly finished work on that volume’s third number, the Islands issue, for which, at Lapham’s request, I’d taken the editorial helm.

His health by then was in steep decline. In the fall of 2023, his doctors insisted on bedrest. The future of the magazine to which he’d devoted the last fifteen years of his life seemed in doubt. But ever since the fall of 2023, those of us to whom Lapham had entrusted the Quarterly have been working behind the scenes to ensure its survival, assisting our newly appointed publisher and first-ever executive director Paul W. Morris.

We believed the Quarterly should live on because there is no magazine like it in American letters. We believed it should live on because, during its first fifteen years, Lapham’s Quarterly attracted a large and loyal audience of readers who made it the best-selling magazine in its class. We believed it should live on because donors large and small have contributed to its survival, recognizing the value of a magazine that brings history and humanistic learning into the public square. And we believed Lapham’s Quarterly should live on because, to quote Marilynne Robinson—a writer Lapham was proud to have published—“This country is in a state of bewilderment that cries out for good history.”

America has if anything grown more bewildered and bewildering in the years since Robinson first issued that diagnosis, that remedy. In 2025, when the news cycle has accelerated into a dizzying blur; when our noisy, hasty technologies of mass communication algorithmically tumble together truths and untruths, facts and fakes and AI hallucinations, the slow pace and the long view of Lapham’s Quarterly seem to us newly and urgently suited to the times.

In March, Paul Morris announced good news. Later this year, the Quarterly will be moving to a new home, the home Lapham had hoped it would find, at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. This wasn’t the only good news: Columbia University acquired Lewis Lapham’s private archives for its Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Hawthornden Foundation, a longtime champion of literary preservation, agreed to take over the lease on the Quarterly’s Union Square West office where it will maintain a permanent memorial featuring a full set of Lapham’s Quarterly back issues, a commemorative plaque, and a display of Lapham’s typewriter and personal desk—artifacts imbued with his devotion to letters.

Now, as we prepare for this next chapter, we at Lapham’s Quarterly have wanted to look back at its history, to put the magazine’s own past in conversation with its present—and its future. At the time of Lewis Lapham’s death in July 2024, the Quarterly’s website had gone dormant and Lapham’s podcast, The World in Time, had fallen silent. We are, this month, waking both back up. On the website, we will be publishing the tributes and reminiscences we had hoped to publish at the time of our founding editor’s death. And then we will be resuming the work to which he’d devoted the last fifteen years of his life, just as he would have wanted.

In the coming weeks, the podcast will be revisiting many of the 57 issues Lapham’s Quarterly published between 2008 and 2023, listening again to some of the voices in their pages, including the voice of Lewis Lapham. Joining the voices of the dead will be the voices of the living, the voices of the sorts of writers and journalists and historians that listeners to The World in Time are used to hearing. As an accompaniment to the podcast, we’ll be publishing new readings on the Quarterly’s website. We won’t be proceeding through its history chronologically, but we will be revisiting its origins and early years. Our first guests will be authors and editors who worked with Lewis Lapham closely and often and knew him well. Here is a preview of what’s coming:

Francine Prose, our new editor-at-large, will be joining us to talk about her memoir 1974: A Personal History. She’ll be taking us back in time to the San Francisco she fled to in the Nixon era.

Kira Brunner Don, the founding Executive Editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, will be joining us to talk about the making of our very first issue, published in Winter 2008, States of War. Brunner Don will also be telling us about Stranger’s Guide, the magazine she launched in 2018 along with publisher Abby Rapoport.

John Jeremiah Sullivan, a contributor to our Spring 2013 issue on Animals, will be talking to us about Adele Amelia Gleason, author of a previously unknown reminiscence of Mark Twain that Sullivan discovered while researching “Twain Dreams: The Enigma of Samuel Clemens,” an essay that appears in the 175th anniversary issue of Harper’s Magazine, on newsstands now.

Ben Tarnoff—who served on the Quarterly’s original staff, along with Jason David Brown, Kira Brunner Don, Timothy Don, and Ann Gollin, among others—will be talking with us about his book The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature.

Later this summer, so as not to let our hypos get the upper hand, so as to drive off the spleen and keep from pausing before coffin warehouses, the Quarterly will set sail for the watery part of the world, revisiting our Summer 2013 issue, The Sea, accompanied by writers and historians. We will be revisiting that particular issue because Lewis Lapham grew up beside San Francisco Bay, and his love of the literature and history of the sea was lifelong.

But we will begin the relaunch of the website and podcast by paying tribute to the memory of our founding editor, sharing with World in Time listeners some voices from the memorial service Lewis Lapham’s family held for him in New York City in September 2024. More plans are already in the works, and all of these plans will be carried out by a team of veteran contributors and editors, named below along with the year they joined the Quarterly’s staff or editorial board, who will be donating their time and labor in a spirit of philanthropy.

We hope you will keep listening and keep reading and keep supporting Lapham’s Quarterly.

Donovan Hohn (2014)

Acting Editor, Lapham’s Quarterly

Editor-at-Large: Francine Prose (2017)

Executive Director and Publisher: Paul W. Morris (2023)

Art Editor: Timothy Don (2007)

Design and Production Director: Jason David Brown (2007)

Contributing Editors, Summer 2025: Elias Altman (2008), Will Augerot (2022), Chris Carroll (2008), Sarah Fan (2016), Aidan Flax-Clark (2008), Henry Freedland (2015), Leopold Froehlich (2014), Jaime Fuller (2017), Madeline Grimm (2021), Adam Iscoe (2020), Michelle Legro (2009), Ben Metcalf (2008), Apoorva Tadepalli (2018), Ben Tarnoff (2008), Caroline Wazer (2017)

Marketing and Membership Director: Shelley Shames (2018)

Interns: Peter Augerot (2025), Christo Hays (2023), Anna Logan (2025)