To talk with Lewis Lapham, you’re struck with the sensation that you've stumbled onto the set of a 1940’s film noir movie. He wears pressed suits and pocket squares—and his stories evoke another era. Lapham says he’s been refining his prose for over 50 years and that he still has to write “three or four or five, sometimes eight drafts of something,” but takes pleasure in “getting it right.” Before taking the helm of Lapham’s Quarterly he was at Harper’s for many years—and he started out at The San Francisco Examiner before stints at The Saturday Evening Post and Life.  

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