Lewis H. Lapham - Republican National Convention

Republican National Convention

Lapham wrote a September 2004 column for Harper's in which he included a brief account of the Republican National Convention as if the event had already happened and he had witnessed it, "reflecting on the content and sharing with readers a question that occurred to him as he listened", as Jennifer Senior wrote in the New York Times Book Review. But the magazine arrived in subscribers’ mailboxes before the convention had actually taken place, as Senior says "forcing Lapham to admit that the scene was a fiction". The columnist apologized, "but pointed out political conventions are drearily scripted anyway — he basically knew what was going to be said". Senior continues, "By this logic, though, I could have chosen not to read Pretensions to Empire before reviewing it, since I already knew Lapham’s sensibility, just as he claims to know the Republicans’." Indeed, Senior's reading of Pretensions to Empire was called into question by her claim that the convention essay was "conspicuously" missing from Pretensions to Empire, when, in fact, an edited version of that essay opens the book. The New York Times published a correction and Senior described her error as "an honest mistake".