Scope and Content Note
The records of Harper's Magazine span the years 1847-1983 with the bulk dating from 1940 to 1983. Harper's published its first number in June 1850, but few of its nineteenth-century records are extant. Surviving records include editorial and general correspondence, business files, and articles in draft form.
The collection has been processed in two parts. Part I is a chronological file that includes correspondence, drafts of articles, and business records arranged by year and thereunder by document type. Part II is arranged in three series: Editors' File , Office File , and Production File . The Editors' File includes the records of editors-in-chief John Fischer, Willie Morris, and Robert Shnayerson and the records of managing and assistant editors, 1944-1979. The Office File contains general correspondence, 1961-1971; reports on letters to the editor, 1969-1981; letters to the editor, principally from September 1981 to January 1983; and a subject file of business and personnel records. Material transferred from Yale University includes nineteenth century documents, 1848-1900, and business records, 1925-1965, that have been incorporated in the Office File . The Production File contains drafts, galleys, and other pre-publication records for some issues of the magazine, 1960-1965, and most issues, 1966-1974, 1976-1977.
One of the most successful of the serious general periodicals, Harper's has been an influential force in shaping America's literary taste. The publishing firm of Harper & Brothers of New York began the magazine in 1850 initially as a vehicle to advertise its books and to serialize popular fiction. Literature was its emphasis, but Harper's also published history, science, geography, criticism, news, and humor, marking the beginnings of the mass-market magazine. Documentation for the nineteenth century includes Henry Mills Alden's letterbook dated 1869-1892 in Part I of the collection and a small group of documents, 1847-1900, in the Office File of Part II. Of note is a letter dated 1889 from William Dean Howells concerning his association with the magazine as an editorial columnist.
In 1925, editors shifted the emphasis of Harper's from literature to political debate and social commentary, typically limiting each issue to one short story and one or two poems. The collection becomes more comprehensive in the World War II era, and records in Part I from the 1940s include war coverage by Fletcher Pratt and John Dos Passos and files concerning censorship imposed by the United States War Department. Manuscripts for articles and stories are organized by the year and month they were published. Contributors represented in the files from the 1940s include Kay Boyle, John Cheever, G. K. Chesterton, Bernard Austine De Voto, Peter Ferdinand Drucker, William Faulkner, Walter Lippmann, Katherine Mansfield, Mary McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Bertrand Russell, J. D. Salinger, and John Steinbeck.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, editor John Fischer moved the magazine toward concern for social and economic problems. Records pertaining to Fischer's editorship can be found in both Part I and Part II of the collection. Fischer's files begin in 1953 in the chronological files of Part I. His records in Part II are divided among the Editors' File , the Office File , and the Production File . Under his leadership, Harper's published articles on McCarthyism and the Peace Corps and introduced supplements on topics such as "The College Scene," "Writing in America," "The American Female," and "The Crisis in American Medicine."
In Part I, manuscripts of articles and stories are organized by the year and month they were published. In Part II, they are in the Production File where they are also organized chronologically by the year and month of publication. American contributors represented in the files from the 1950s and early 1960s include Dean Acheson, William Faulkner, John Kenneth Galbraith, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Arthur M. Schlesinger (1917- ), James Thurber, Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, E. B. White, and Thornton Wilder along with international writers Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Winston Churchill, Roald Dahl, Anthony Eden, E. M. Forster, John Fowles, Robert Graves, W. Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bernard Shaw. Correspondence with these contributors in Part II is in the Editors' File and Office File series.
As the 1960s continued, the magazine market changed and Harper's had difficulty maintaining its preeminence. Willie Morris, named editor in 1967, undertook to reestablish Harper's earlier reputation as a literary magazine. Harper's serialized portions of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Morris commissioned Norman Mailer to write about the protests against the Vietnam War. When this assignment grew to book length, Harper's devoted the entire March 1968 issue to "Steps of the Pentagon," a draft of which is in the Production File of Part II for that year. Mailer later expanded "Steps of the Pentagon," publishing it as the prize-winning book, Armies of the Night. Harper's financial decline continued, however, and Morris, after a dispute with business managers, resigned in early 1971 and was succeeded by Robert Shnayerson. Morris' tenure as editor-in-chief is documented in the Editors' File and Office File series in Part II.
Manuscripts in the Production File for other stories and poems published in the 1960s include contributions by John Ashbery, Maxine Kumin, Bernard Malamud, Larry McMurtry, Walker Percy, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Updike, and Robert Penn Warren. Articles on the Vietnam War were written by David Halberstam, Seymour M. Hersh, and Neil Sheehan. Correspondence and other records pertaining to these contributors is found throughout the Editors' File and Office File series.
Editors Robert Shnayerson and Lewis Lapham continued to publish prominent authors. Manuscripts in the Production File for articles, stories, and poems published in the 1970s include contributions by Maya Angelou, Saul Bellow, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, E. L. Doctorow, R. Buckminster Fuller, James Jones, George S. McGovern, Arthur Miller, Bill D. Moyers, Daniel P. Moynihan, Joyce Carol Oates, Adrienne Rich, Philip Roth, Bayard Rustin, William Saroyan, Mark Strand, Paul Theroux, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Garry Wills, and Tom Wolfe. The international group includes Simone de Beauvoir, Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, Gabriel García Márquez, Nadine Gordimer, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Jessica Mitford, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, and Igor Stravinsky. Despite the prestige of its contributors, however, Harper's continued to lose subscribers and revenue and the magazine was nearly dissolved. In 1980, Harper's was purchased by the MacArthur and Atlantic Richfield foundations and established as a nonprofit organization. The transition to nonprofit status is partly documented in the Office File.
The records of Harper's Magazine concern many aspects of publishing history and American cultural life. As editor Lewis Lapham described the magazine in the early 1980s, Harper's has been a "national opinion page, an annotated contemporaneous history, a monthly review of the trend of events and the tendencies of the public mind." The Production File , with supporting records in the Editors' File and Office File series, documents the process by which writers, statesmen, and other public figures shaped and presented their views or otherwise debated topical issues.