NEW YORK, NY.- Lewis H. Lapham, the scholarly patrician who edited Harper’s Magazine for nearly three decades, and who in columns, books and later his own magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, attacked what he regarded as the inequities and hypocrisies of American life, died Tuesday in Rome. He was 89.

His death was announced by his children. A longtime resident of New York City’s Upper East Side, he had been living in Rome with his wife and other family members since January.

The scion of a shipping and banking family whose forebears included a founder of Texaco and a mayor of San Francisco, Lapham was a nationally respected journalist whose commentaries on politics, wars and the wealthy were disparaged by conservative critics but often likened by admirers to the satires and cultural criticisms of H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain.

After a decade as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer, Lapham was the managing editor of Harper’s from 1971 to 1975 and the editor-in-chief from 1976 to 1981 and from 1983 to 2006. He offered a blend of high culture and populism: the fiction of John Updike and George Saunders mixed with reports on abortion fights, global warming and the age of terrorism — generally, but not always, with a progressive eye.

Politically, Harper’s on Lapham’s watch was increasingly critical of American domestic and foreign policies. His columns denounced both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush, and he called for the impeachment of Bush for what he regarded as deceptions that led the nation into war in Iraq.

Lapham’s last book, “Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy” (2016), a collection of columns, argued that the election of Donald Trump was the culmination of decades of degradation of United States democracy under a number of Republican administrations, ending in what he called a dysfunctional plutocracy of the superrich, by the superrich and for the superrich.

In 2006, Lapham retired from Harper’s and founded his quarterly, an intellectual journal that used the lessons of history and the persuasions of literature to dissect modern problems. Each issue of the magazine was devoted to one subject — war, crime, money, medicine — and its content ranged from the classical writings of the ancient world to contributions from modern celebrities.

“The idea was to bring the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present,” Lapham told The New York Times in 2009 when asked about his magazine’s mission. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” he said, “but it rhymes.”

Lapham was a good fit at Harper’s: an editor of bedrock literary and historical learning and an elegant writer with common sense, taking long views that seemed to transcend the divisions of modern life. Founded in 1850, Harper’s is the nation’s oldest continuously published monthly, covering politics, culture, finance and the arts. Writings by Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, Herman Melville and Willa Cather, among many others, have appeared in its pages.

Intellectually, Lapham was an aristocratic populist on the left, just as William F. Buckley Jr., who founded the conservative National Review, was on the right. Both were Yale-educated editors and wordsmiths, and both were frequently seen on television: Buckley as the host of “Firing Line” and Lapham as the host and writer of a six-part PBS series, “America’s Century,” in 1989 and host of the weekly PBS series “Bookmark” from 1989 to 1991.

Both were also guests together, sometimes as part of a group, on televised discussions of current events — although they never directly debated each other. “We appeared on panel discussions, but they were conversations, not head-to-head debates,” Lapham said in an interview for this obituary in 2018.

In 1980, Harper’s, which was losing $1.5 million a year, nearly folded. Its owner, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Co., set a date to end publication. Hoping to keep it going, Lapham organized a group to buy Harper’s, but its offer was rejected, and he put together a last issue. But then the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Atlantic Richfield Co. and its founder, Robert Orville Anderson, stepped in with funds to establish the nonprofit Harper’s Magazine Foundation, which still publishes Harper’s.

Lapham left Harper’s in 1981, partly in a disagreement with the foundation over the magazine’s direction. His return, in 1983, was based on his plan to restructure the magazine to distinguish it from its rival The Atlantic Monthly, and to raise circulation and advertising revenues.

Instead of long articles and literary pieces, he ran a few original reports and more cultural criticism, fiction, poetry and several innovative features, like “Harper’s Index,” which used statistics as editorial commentary; “Readings,” excerpts from essays, letters and speeches; and “Annotations,” a selection of annotated texts, including White House news releases and the trivia of a PBS program schedule.

Lapham also wrote a monthly column — called “Easy Chair” before 1981 and then “Notebook” — in which he ranged over many subjects, often targeting upper-class frivolities, government corruption and what he called national obsessions with money, power and material possessions. He sprinkled his essays and talk with allusions to Goethe, Cicero, Hamilton, Madison, Montaigne and the classics.

“I think the argument is not liberals-conservatives, Democrats-Republicans or left-right,” he told The Christian Science Monitor. “The argument is between past and future. That’s where a line forms: what is regressive and what weighs you down, the too-old or stultified or barbarous notions, and what takes you forward and gives you a hope of discovering a change, the freedom of the imagination.”

In one “Notebook” column, in 1995, Lapham took on what he labeled “reactionary chic” in the world of culture:

“At presumably higher elevations of culture, the air was always thick with Christian piety and bourgeois sentiment. Herman Melville was condemned to obscurity, Mark Twain was obliged to present himself as an amiable clown, and Edith Wharton, together with Henry James and Ezra Pound, left for Europe.

“When tellers of the sad Republican tale agree to take questions on the subject, it turns out that the lost culture for which they grieve is the culture best expressed by the sensibility of the 1950s, the musical comedies of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the history of the world as told by Disney and Time-Life, the list of great books that everybody owns but nobody has read.”

In a 2004 Harper’s column, Lapham delighted many readers by offering an account of the Republican National Convention, with rueful observations on the proceedings, in an issue that arrived in subscribers’ mailboxes before the convention began. Lapham apologized for the parody in case anyone was offended, but, as The Times noted, he “pointed out that political conventions are drearily scripted anyway — he basically knew what was going to be said.”

Many of his 15 or so books had their genesis in his essays in Harper’s, including “Fortune’s Child: A Portrait of the United States as Spendthrift Heir” (1980), a collection of thematically unified columns around his metaphor of America as a spoiled rich kid. Similarly, “Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siècle” (1995) portrayed a society of lost values as it approached the turn of the millennium.

And “Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy” (2004) indicted the Bush administration for what Lapham called its efforts to deceive the nation about the Iraq War’s origins and aims. Kirkus Reviews called the book “literate, sophisticated and plenty ticked-off: vintage Lapham and a ringing endorsement of First Amendment freedoms.”

In 2005, Lapham wrote and appeared in “The American Ruling Class,” a documentary-style film featuring fictional characters as well as interviews with real celebrities, including Bill Bradley, Walter Cronkite, Pete Seeger, Robert Altman and Barbara Ehrenreich. It was shown on the Sundance Channel in 2007.

After stepping down from the editor’s perch in 2006, Lapham undertook his last diversion: Lapham’s Quarterly, which examined modern problems through prisms of history. It ran writings by Aesop and Aeschylus, medieval theologian Peter Abelard, John Adams and Louisa May Alcott, as well as Renata Adler, Woody Allen and Andre Agassi.

Lapham’s lighter side often appeared in the Times. In a 1979 opinion essay that he called “The Servant Problem,” he wrote:

“To the extent that the sovereign people have lost interest in governing themselves, they depend upon their servants to ward off their enemies, provide them with amusement and support the market value of their souls.

“Rather than vote or read the Constitution (a document as tiresome as the trust agreements family lawyers occasionally ask them to sign), the heirs prefer to go to Mexico or Aspen to practice macrobiotic breathing and play sexual charades.”

Lewis Henry Lapham II was born Jan. 8, 1935, in San Francisco, the older of two sons of Lewis Abbot and Jane (Foster) Lapham. His father became president of the Grace Line and Bankers Trust. His grandfather, Roger Lapham, had been San Francisco’s mayor in the 1940s, and his great-grandfather, Lewis Henry Lapham, had been a founder of Texaco.

Lewis and his brother, Anthony (who became a top CIA lawyer), grew up in what he called “equestrian class” affluence. Lewis graduated from the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut in 1952 and from Yale in 1956. After a year of history studies at the University of Cambridge in England, he was a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner and The New York Herald Tribune and then wrote for The Saturday Evening Post and Life magazine.

In 1972, he married Joan Brooke Reeves. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughter, Delphina Boncompagni Ludovisi of Rome; two sons, Andrew and Winston Lapham; and 10 grandchildren.

Lapham wrote for Commentary, Vanity Fair, Fortune, Forbes and many other publications. He won the National Magazine Award in 1995 for his columns in Harper’s and the 2002 Thomas Paine Journalism Award, and he was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame in 2007.

Some readers saw a contradiction in Lapham’s affluent life and his stalwart liberalism. But he said he made his choice soon after graduating from Yale, when he applied for a job with the CIA, then a bastion of Ivy League elitism.

The first question he was asked, he said, was, “When standing on the 13th tee at the National Golf Links in Southampton, which club does one take from the bag?”

“They wanted to make sure you were the right sort,” he explained.

He found the question off-putting and dropped his spy ambitions for a career in journalism, although he said he knew the answer: a 7-iron.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.