Lewis H. Lapham, Longtime Editor of Harper’s, Dies at 89

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Lewis H. Lapham, the scholarly patrician who edited Harper’s Magazine for nearly three decades, and who in columns, books and later his own magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, attacked what he regarded as the inequities and hypocrisies of American life, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 89. His death was announced by his children. A longtime resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he had been living in Rome with his wife and other family members since January. The scion of a shipping and banking family whose forebears included a founder of Texaco and a mayor of San Francisco, Mr. Lapham (pronounced LAP-um) was a nationally respected journalist whose commentaries on politics, wars and the wealthy were disparaged by conservative critics but often likened by admirers to the satires and cultural criticisms of H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain. After a decade as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer, Mr. Lapham was the managing editor of Harper’s from 1971 to 1975 and the editor in chief from 1976 to 1981 and from 1983 to 2006. He offered a blend of high culture and populism: the fiction of John Updike and George Saunders mixed with reports on abortion fights, global warming and the age of terrorism — generally, but not always, with a progressive eye.