Harper's Magazine

Harper's Magazine is the oldest comprehensive monthly magazine in American history, exploring issues that drive dialogue in our country through lengthy narrative news and essays, as well as iconic columns such as the Harper's Index. Harper's Magazine emphasizes exquisite writing and original ideas, providing readers with unique perspectives on politics, society, environment, and culture. The essays, novels, and reports in the magazine come from promising new voices and some of the most outstanding figures in American literature, including Anne Dillard, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Gateskill, David Foster Wallace, and Tom Wolfe.

Harper's Magazine was founded in June 1850 and is the creative work of the famous New York book publishing company, the Harper Brothers. First printed 7500 copies, sold out immediately, with circulation reaching 50000 copies within six months.

Although the earliest issues of the magazine mainly featured materials already published in the UK, the magazine soon began to publish works by American artists and writers, including Horatio Alger, Stephen Douglas, Theodore Dreiser, Horace Greeley, Winslow Homer, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Jack London, John Muir, Frederick Remington, Booth Tarkington, and Mark Twain. Several departments of the magazine regularly reported on important events of the time, such as the publication of Herman Melville's novel "Moby Dick," the laying of the first transatlantic cable, the latest discoveries from Thomas Edison's studio, and the progress of the women's rights movement.

In recent years, the magazine has published works by Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, both of whom had already been published before becoming political leaders. Theodore Roosevelt wrote for Harper's, and Henry L. Stimson defended the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. In the 1970s, Harper's magazine exposed Seymour Hersh's coverage of the massacre in the village of Maylie and published a special issue of Norman Mailer's' Sexual Prisoners'.

Over the years, the format of the magazine has been continuously improved, the overall appearance has undergone significant changes, and ownership has changed hands multiple times. In 1962, the Harper brothers merged with Row, Peterson,&Company to form Harper&Row (now HarperCollins). A few years later, the magazine became an independent company and became a department of Minneapolis Star Inn Press Company. In 1980, when the parent company announced that Harper's Magazine would cease publication, John R. MacArthur and his father Roderick urged the boards of directors of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Atlantic Richfield Company to donate assets and funds to establish the Harper's Magazine Foundation. The foundation is now a completely independent organization, not affiliated with any other charitable organization, dedicated to promoting Harper's Magazine as an independent voice for American culture.

In 1984, Harper's Magazine was completely redesigned by editors Lewis H. Lapham and MacArthur, who had become the publisher and foundation president of Harper's Magazine. Considering the time constraints of modern readers, this revived magazine has introduced original news formats such as "Harpers Magazine Index," "Reading," and "Annotations," to supplement its highly acclaimed novels, essays, and reports. Over the years, Harper's Magazine has won 22 national magazine awards, as well as many other journalism and literary honors.

The year 2000 marked the 150th anniversary of the founding of Harper's Magazine. To celebrate this historic moment, the magazine introduced several new editorial innovations and restorations: "Archive" and "Weekly Review". The magazine also published "American Albums: Harper's Magazine 150 Years", a hardcover, 712 page illustrated collection with Lewis H. Lapham and Arthur Schlesinger as prefaces, extracting a unique perspective of American life from the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in American history.