Lewis Lapham recently announced that he will step down as editor in chief of Harper’s magazine in the spring of 2006. He will remain with the monthly magazine as editor in chief emeritus, and will continue to write his “Notebook” column.
Lapham started at Harper’s as the managing editor in 1971, and has served as editor since 1976 (with a hiatus from 1981 to 1983). In addition to the more than three hundred essays he has written for the magazine, Lapham has published thirteen books, most recently With the Beatles (Melville House, 2005). During his tenure, he has published the writing of T.C. Boyle, Annie Dillard, Jonathan Franzen, Francine Prose, Marilynne Robinson, David Foster Wallace, John Edgar Wideman, and Tom Wolfe, among others.
Lapham will be succeeded by current deputy editor Roger Hodge, who began his career at Harper’s as an intern in 1996. He was later hired as a fact-checker, and was named deputy editor in 2004.
Harper’s, founded in 1850, is considered the oldest continually published general interest magazine in the United States.
