Lapham's Quarterly: Volume 1

Four times a year, the editors of Lapham's Quarterly explore a topic current in the headlines, carefully selecting hundreds of pieces of literature and art that span three millennia and bring timeless perspective to each topic. In each issue you will find both historical and contemporary writings on the topic, along with a preamble written by Lewis Lapham. In "States of War", the premier issue of the Quarterly, you will find the works of Sun Tzu, Voltaire, Homer, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Tim O'Brien, and Richard Nixon along with contemporary writers such as Caleb Carr and Fritz Stern. The second issue "About Money" offers perspective from the writings of Aristophanes, Karl Marx, John the Apostle, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Virginia Woolf and Daniel Loeb, as well as contemporary historians Jack Weatherford and Jackson Lears. "Book of Nature" pays tribute to the timeless tug-of-war between man and nature, examined by Charles Darwin, John Steinbeck, Sir Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Rachel Carson, Virgil and Edward Abbey. The contemporary essays are written by D. Graham Burnett and Steven Stoll along with several others. The most current issue, "Ways of Learning" looks at the history of education from the writings of great educators, philosophers, and authors. Thomas Jefferson, Buddah, Leonardo da Vinci, Helen Keller, Sylvia Plath,Denis Diderot and Quintilian are among those providing the back story while Andrew Delbanco and George Steiner look at the change of the college idea and experience and the loss of the study of the humanities to the study of sciences.

Mr. Lapham currently writes "Notebook," a bi-monthly column for Harper's that won a National Magazine Award in 1995 for exhibiting "an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity." He has also written for Life, Commentary, The National Review, Yale Literary Magazine, Elle, Forbes, The American Spectator, Vanity Fair, Golf Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Maclean's, The London Observer, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

A Native of San Francisco, Mr. Lapham was educated at Yale College and Cambridge University. He served two terms as editor of Harper's Magazine (1976-1981 and 1983-2006), and, during those thirty years, the 157-year-old monthly won fourteen National Magazine Awards. Mr. Lapham was inducted into the American Society of magazine Editor's Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement in February 2007.