Lewis Lapham Lights Up

Besides, he says, smiling wryly, "it was fairly accurate."

Comings and Goings

"The term most people use to describe Lewis is patrician, and he does have that air," says Tom Wolfe, the novelist and journalist. "He's very much part of a social network. He does know a wide range of people in the upper orders. That's why I think he has a lot of fun with his left-leaning views."

Lapham has published many of Wolfe's iconoclastic pieces in Harper's -- "The Painted Word," his 1975 attack on modern art; "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," his 1989 assault on the modern novel; and "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists," his 2000 evisceration of radical English professors.

Wolfe and Lapham share a fondness for shooting spitballs at sacred cows. "He is politically a real maverick," says Wolfe, who believes that attitude improves Harper's: "It's very idiosyncratic, and I mean that in a good way."

Lapham arrived at Harper's in 1971, hired as a writer by legendary editor Willie Morris. A couple weeks later, Morris got fired and most of the staff quit in protest. When the smoke cleared, Lapham was the managing editor. In 1976, he became editor.

In June 1980, the owners of Harper's announced they were killing the magazine, which was losing gobs of money. At the Chicago Sun-Times, a cub reporter named Rick MacArthur read that news on the wire.

"This is terrible," he thought. "It's my favorite magazine."

MacArthur called his father, J. Roderick MacArthur, who happened to be on the board of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

"I said, 'Do you think the MacArthur Foundation could bail out Harper's?' " Rick MacArthur recalls. "And my father, who is a very unusual man, said, 'Why not?' "

So the MacArthur Foundation bought Harper's and set up the Harper's Magazine Foundation to run it. The magazine kept losing money -- intellectual magazines inevitably do -- and in 1981, the Harper's Foundation board canned Lapham and hired Michael Kinsley to run the magazine.

"They fired him and hired me," recalls Kinsley, now a syndicated columnist, "and I met him once when he gave me the key to the men's room."

Rick MacArthur, by then a reporter for United Press International, was irate at Lapham's firing. He took a leave of absence from UPI, joined the Harper's Foundation board and started organizing a counterrevolution. In 1984, he pulled it off: The board fired Kinsley and rehired Lapham.