“I’m an essayist, not a podcaster,” says Lapham’s Quarterly acting editor Donovan Hohn, “but then the same could be said of Lewis, who took the form and the medium of the podcast and did with it what he’d done all of his adulthood: have conversations with people whose voices he wished to hear. Seasoned listeners to The World in Time may rest assured that similar conversations will resume shortly. This episode, my first behind the microphone, won’t be a conversation, but it will be a duet. I’ll be sharing the microphone with Lewis Lapham.”

 

This week on the podcast Donovan Hohn hosts two episodes devoted to the life, career, and memory of our founding editor, Lewis H. Lapham. In this first episode, Hohn announces the Quarterly’s plans for Summer 2025, shares excerpts from a keynote address Lapham delivered at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2011, pays tribute to Lapham the essayist, and gives an account of the months preceding and following Lewis’ death in July 2024.

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WORKS CITED

[In order of mention]

 

Lewis H. Lapham. “Episode 102: Robert D. Kaplan.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, August 18, 2023.

 

Donovan Hohn. “Watermarks.” Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. XI, Number 3, Summer 2018: Water.

 

Donovan Hohn. “These Little Words.” Harper’s Magazine, July 2024.

 

Lewis H. Lapham. “Power Outage.” Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. XV, Number 2, Winter 2024: Energy.

 

Francine Prose. 1974: A Personal History. New York: Harper, 2024.

 

John Jeremiah Sullivan. “Twain Dreams.” Harper’s Magazine, June 2025.

 

Ben Tarnoff. The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.

 

Herman Melville. Moby Dick; or, The Whale. Foreword by Nathaniel Philbrick. Illustrated by Tony Millionaire. New York: Penguin Classics, 2009.

 

Lewis H. Lapham. “Memento Mori.” Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. VI, Number 4, Fall 2013: Death.

 

William Wordsworth. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Selected Poems. Edited by Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004.

 

Marilynne Robinson. “What Is Freedom of Conscience?” What Are We Doing Here? Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018.

 

Mark Twain. Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings. Edited by Bernard DeVoto. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004.

 

Herman Melville. The Confidence-Man. Introduced by John Bryant. New York: Modern Classics, 2003.

 

James Fenimore Cooper. The American Democrat: Or Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.

 

Régis Debray. “The Indispensable Nation.” Harper’s Magazine, January 2004.

 

Annie Dillard. “The Wreck of Time.” Harper’s Magazine, January 1998.

 

Barbara Ann Kipfer. Roget’s International Thesaurus, 8th ed. New York: Collins Reference, 2022.

 

Oxford Languages. Concise Oxford English Dictionary: 12th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

 

D.C. Browning, comp. The Complete Dictionary of Shakespeare Quotations. London: New Orchard Editions, 1991.

 

Annie Dillard. “Innocence in the Galapagos.” Harper’s Magazine, May 1975.

 

Annie Dillard. “Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos.” Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013.

 

Annie Dillard, et al. “Remembering Lewis Lapham.” Harper’s Magazine, November 2024.

 

Exodus 19:16–19. The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008.

 

Lewis H. Lapham. “Man and Beast.” Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. VI, Number 2, Spring 2013: Animals.

 

T.H. White. The Once and Future King. New York: Ace, 1987.