Wikipedia Deep Dive

Harper's Magazine

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America's Oldest Survivor

In June 1850, while California was still figuring out how to become a state and the telegraph was barely a decade old, a magazine launched in New York City that would outlast empires. Harper's Magazine printed 7,500 copies of its first issue. They sold out almost immediately.

One hundred and seventy-five years later, it's still publishing.

That makes Harper's the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States. To put this in perspective: when Harper's started, Queen Victoria had been on the throne for just thirteen years, Abraham Lincoln was an obscure Illinois lawyer, and Charles Darwin hadn't yet published "On the Origin of Species." The magazine has witnessed the Civil War, two World Wars, the moon landing, the internet revolution, and the rise of social media—all while maintaining its monthly publication schedule.

Starting With Stolen Goods

The magazine's origin story isn't particularly noble. Those early issues were stuffed with material pirated from English authors—Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, the Brontë sisters. International copyright law barely existed, and American publishers freely reprinted British work without permission or payment.

This was standard practice at the time. The United States wouldn't sign an international copyright agreement until 1891, and until then, American publishers treated European literature as a free resource to be mined at will. It was legally dubious but commercially brilliant. Why pay American writers when you could simply copy the best British authors?

But the magazine evolved. It began publishing American writers and eventually attracted some of the most significant literary and political voices of their eras. Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick"—one of the greatest American novels ever written—first appeared partially in Harper's. The October 1851 issue included a chapter called "The Town-Ho's Story," making Harper's readers among the first people in the world to encounter Captain Ahab's doomed pursuit of the white whale.

Winston Churchill wrote for the magazine. So did Woodrow Wilson. Not as president—Wilson was an academic and writer long before he entered politics, and his relationship with Harper's predated his political career.

The Corporate Family Tree

Understanding who owns what in publishing can be confusing, so let's untangle this.

Harper's Magazine was founded by Harper & Brothers, a publishing house that also launched Harper's Weekly, a news magazine, and Harper's Bazaar, the fashion publication. Same parent company, completely different publications. Harper's Weekly folded in 1916, but Harper's Bazaar still exists today as a major fashion magazine—it just has nothing to do with Harper's Magazine editorially. They share a name and a common ancestor, nothing more.

Harper & Brothers eventually merged with other companies and became HarperCollins, one of the largest book publishers in the world. But here's where it gets interesting: Harper's Magazine itself broke away from the corporate parent. In 1965, it became a separately incorporated entity, passing to the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Company, which was owned by the Cowles Media Company.

So despite the name, Harper's Magazine has no current connection to HarperCollins the book publisher. The magazine went its own way decades ago.

The Willie Morris Explosion

The early 1970s nearly destroyed Harper's.

Willie Morris had become editor in 1967 at the remarkably young age of thirty-two, making him one of the youngest people ever to lead a major American magazine. Under his direction, Harper's became one of the most exciting publications in the country. He recruited an extraordinary stable of writers: Norman Mailer, David Halberstam, Marshall Frady, Larry L. King. The magazine tackled controversial subjects head-on, including Seymour Hersh's reporting on the My Lai Massacre, where American soldiers murdered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians.

Then, in 1971, Morris resigned under pressure from owner John Cowles Jr.

The literary world erupted. This wasn't just an editor leaving a job—it became a cultural event. Norman Mailer, William Styron, Gay Talese, Bill Moyers, and Tom Wicker publicly declared they would boycott Harper's as long as the Cowles family owned it. Four staff writers resigned in solidarity with Morris. The magazine lost much of what had made it essential reading.

What drove Morris out? The specifics remain somewhat murky, but the tension centered on editorial independence versus business pressures. Morris wanted to publish challenging, sometimes uncomfortable material. The owners wanted a more commercially viable product. It's an old story in American journalism, repeated countless times before and since.

Death and Resurrection

Nine years later, Harper's faced an even more existential threat.

On June 17, 1980, the Star Tribune announced it would simply stop publishing the magazine after the August issue. After 130 years of continuous publication, Harper's would die not with a bang but with a corporate memo.

It took just three weeks to save it.

John R. MacArthur—who goes by Rick—and his father Roderick scrambled to assemble rescue funding. They secured pledges from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Atlantic Richfield Company, and CEO Robert Orville Anderson. Together, they raised $1.5 million to establish the Harper's Magazine Foundation, a nonprofit entity that would own and publish the magazine.

This unusual structure—a major magazine owned by a nonprofit foundation—gave Harper's a degree of independence from commercial pressures that few publications enjoy. Rick MacArthur became the publisher and president of the foundation, a position he still holds decades later.

The Harper's Index

In 1984, under editor Lewis Lapham and publisher MacArthur, the magazine underwent a significant redesign. The most enduring innovation was the "Harper's Index," a feature that has since become one of the most widely imitated formats in journalism.

The Index presents statistics derived from current events, but with a twist. The numbers are arranged to create ironic contrasts, to highlight absurdities, to make readers see familiar facts in new ways. A typical Index might juxtapose military spending with education funding, or place a statistic about wealth inequality next to one about luxury goods sales.

It's data journalism as a form of commentary—the numbers speak, but their arrangement gives them a voice.

The redesign also introduced "Readings," a curated collection of excerpts from various sources, and "Annotation," which takes a primary document and marks it up with explanatory notes. These features, along with the traditional fiction, essays, and reportage, created a distinctive hybrid format that set Harper's apart from other literary magazines.

The Epstein Controversy

In September 1970, Harper's published an essay that would haunt its legacy for decades.

Joseph Epstein wrote "Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity," a piece expressing profoundly negative views about homosexuality. The language was stunning in its hostility. Epstein compared being gay to "a state of permanent niggerdom among men" and wrote that if he had the power, he "would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth."

This wasn't some fringe publication—Harper's was a mainstream, respected literary magazine. Publishing such virulent anti-gay content gave it a veneer of intellectual respectability.

The Gay Activists Alliance, known as the GAA, responded by submitting three articles for the magazine to consider. Harper's refused. The GAA then organized a "zap"—a direct action protest—on October 27, 1970. Television news covered the confrontation. When GAA member Arthur Evans challenged editor Midge Decter about publishing Epstein's essay, she denied that it reflected any anti-gay prejudice.

But the controversy produced something valuable. Merle Miller, a former Harper's editor, was so outraged by Epstein's piece that he publicly came out and wrote his own response: "What It Means to Be a Homosexual," published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on January 17, 1971. Miller's essay is now considered a landmark of American journalism, one of the first mainstream coming-out narratives by a prominent writer.

"I am sick and tired," Miller said of Epstein's article, "of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends."

Sometimes terrible writing produces essential responses.

War Photography and the Courts

In August 2004, Harper's published a photo essay by Peter Turnley that led to a federal court case reaching the United States Supreme Court.

Turnley had photographed death, grieving, and funerals from both sides of the war in Afghanistan. For the American perspective, he attended the funeral of Specialist Kyle Brinlee, a twenty-one-year-old Oklahoma National Guard member killed when his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device. The funeral was held in his high school auditorium to accommodate 1,200 mourners.

Turnley photographed the open casket.

Brinlee's family sued Harper's, arguing that publishing the photograph violated their privacy rights. The case wound through the federal court system for three years. The family had invited the press to the funeral, which proved legally decisive. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that while the publication was in "poor taste," the magazine had not violated the family's privacy rights because they had opened the funeral to the public.

The case highlighted the tension between photojournalism's power to document reality and families' desire to control how their loved ones are remembered. There's no clean answer here—both the impulse to document and the impulse to protect have merit.

The Revolving Editorial Door

Since Lewis Lapham stepped down in 2006 after two separate stints totaling more than two decades, Harper's has struggled to maintain editorial stability.

Roger Hodge succeeded Lapham but was fired in January 2010. Publisher MacArthur initially claimed Hodge was leaving for "personal reasons" before later admitting he had fired him. Ellen Rosenbush served as editor from 2010 to 2015. Christopher Cox was named editor in October 2015 and fired just three months later, in January 2016. Rosenbush returned. James Marcus took over in 2016.

Then came the Roiphe affair.

In March 2018, Harper's prepared to publish an essay by Katie Roiphe about the MeToo movement. The piece was critical of MeToo, and controversy erupted both online and within the magazine itself. Editor James Marcus objected to the essay, arguing that criticizing MeToo was inappropriate given Harper's "longtime reputation as a gentleman's smoking club"—an acknowledgment that the magazine's own history included problematic treatment of women and gender issues.

Marcus attributed this disagreement as a primary cause of his firing in 2018. Rosenbush returned yet again, this time as editorial director. Finally, in October 2019, novelist and essayist Christopher Beha became editor, a position he has held with greater longevity than his recent predecessors.

The Open Letter

In July 2020, Harper's stepped into one of the most contentious cultural debates of the moment.

The magazine published "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate," signed by over 150 prominent writers, academics, and public intellectuals. The letter criticized what it called "illiberalism" and promoted tolerance of different viewpoints. It warned against "an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty."

The response was immediate and polarized.

Critics pointed out that the signatories included some of the most privileged and platform-rich people in public life—people who faced virtually no actual risk of being silenced. What did it mean for wealthy, famous writers to complain about "cancel culture" when their books remained bestsellers and their opinions dominated major publications?

The presence of J.K. Rowling among the signatories drew particular attention. Rowling had recently faced criticism for her public statements about transgender people. Some felt her inclusion undermined the letter's claims to principled free-speech advocacy, suggesting instead that it was defending a particular ideological faction.

Others defended the letter as a necessary stand against intellectual conformity, arguing that the critics were proving its point by attacking the signatories rather than engaging with their arguments.

The controversy illustrated something essential about Harper's place in American culture: it remains influential enough that what it publishes matters, that its endorsements carry weight, that its pages can still ignite national debates.

What Harper's Is

Harper's Magazine occupies an unusual position in American media. It's not a news magazine like Time or Newsweek. It's not purely literary like The Paris Review. It's not explicitly political like The Nation or National Review.

Instead, it blends long-form reportage, literary fiction, cultural criticism, and political commentary into something harder to categorize. A single issue might contain a short story by a major novelist, an investigative report on corporate malfeasance, a reprint of a nineteenth-century speech, and the Harper's Index.

According to a 2012 Pew Research Center study, Harper's, along with The Atlantic and The New Yorker, ranked highest in college-educated readership among major American media outlets. This suggests the magazine reaches exactly the audience it aims for: serious readers who want substantial engagement with ideas.

The magazine has won twenty-two National Magazine Awards, the industry's equivalent of the Oscars. It maintains both a print edition and an online presence, including blogs and a newsletter called the "Weekly Review" that distills political, scientific, and bizarre news into three paragraphs, arranged—like the Index—for ironic contrast.

Survival as Achievement

What does it mean that Harper's Magazine still exists?

Consider how many publications have died since 1850. Harper's Weekly, the magazine's sibling, folded in 1916. Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post—iconic American magazines that seemed permanent institutions—all ceased regular publication. Newspapers that dominated their cities for a century disappeared in years. The internet has accelerated this process dramatically, killing publications that seemed healthy just months before their end.

Harper's has survived not because it found some magic formula but because, at crucial moments, people cared enough to save it. When the Star Tribune abandoned it in 1980, MacArthur assembled a rescue coalition in three weeks. The nonprofit foundation structure has insulated the magazine from the quarter-to-quarter profit pressures that crush commercially owned publications.

This is not to say Harper's has avoided controversy or mistakes. The Epstein essay remains a stain on its record. The editorial instability of recent decades suggests internal dysfunction. The MeToo controversy revealed tensions between the magazine's progressive self-image and its actual institutional culture.

But survival itself is an achievement. Every month for 175 years, Harper's has published something. Through the Civil War, two world wars, the Great Depression, the digital revolution—through all of it, the magazine kept appearing. That continuity represents something increasingly rare: an institutional commitment to long-form writing, to serious engagement with ideas, to the belief that readers will show up for substantive content.

In an age of tweets and hot takes and content designed to maximize engagement metrics, Harper's continued existence is itself a statement. Some things are worth doing slowly, carefully, and at length. Some readers still want that. And one magazine, at least, has been providing it since before the telephone existed.