Harper's Referee

James, John, Joseph and Fletcher Harper, founding Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1850, dedicated it to publishing "an immense amount of useful and entertaining reading matter . . ." Last week with the July issue, Harper's changed its page size--but not its purpose--for the first time in 98 years. Frederick Lewis Allen, sixth in the succession of long-lived editors, firmly assured everybody: "We have altered our clothes but not our personality . . . We are still a magazine for people who know how to read and are willing to make the effort. . ."

Harper's had changed printers and adopted a larger (TIME-sized) format, to cut the cost of production; the old printer, figuring that few modern presses could handle the outdated Harper's page, had demanded a 27% price hike.

Culture's Bastion. "Fred" Allen, 58 years old this week, is a tall (6 ft.), spare (130 lbs.) Bostonian whose modest prayer is that his mind will always be larger than his frame. Fred's father, a Back Bay minister, sent him to Groton (it tasted awful but was good for him, he feels--like milk of magnesia). At Harvard he was on the Lampoon with Cartoonist Gluyas Williams and the late Robert Benchley. Allen landed his first editorial job under Ellery Sedgwick on the Atlantic Monthly, was managing editor of the old Century at only 26. He joined Harper's in 1923, and became its editor in 1941.

Harper's gets about 1,900 manuscripts a month, and reads them all. Some of the best stuff is unsolicited: Columbia Historian Henry Steele Commager's article on the witch-hunt mentality ("Who Is Loyal to America?") which 65,000 readers requested in reprint, came in the morning mail. Ex-Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson arrived in person with his headline-making article on "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb."

Harper's was the first magazine to buy stories by Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson; today, less literary than its friendly rival, the Atlantic, it is also more concerned with contemporary history. Allen frequently consults his good friend, the Atlantic's Editor Ted Weeks. Each regards his magazine as one of culture's last bastions against engulfing tides of vulgarity and mass thinking. Harper's, Allen says, is a forum for the "unorganized, unrecognized, unorthodox and unterrified," though it is rarely as bold as all that.

Buying a Day. Sitting down with an author, Editor Allen will whisper soothingly ("But I can't do this to you . . . What a shame to lose this . . ."). Before the author knows it, Allen has slashed and re-arranged the manuscript. A successful author himself (Only Yesterday, a history of the '20s, sold 750,000 copies), Allen scrupulously tots up office hours spent on his own writing, then "buys a day" (i.e., deducts it from his salary). Fred and his wife Agnes (a Reader's Digest editor) collaborated on the between-the-wars picture-history, I Remember Distinctly.

A bookish but unpretentious sort, Allen likes to play parlor word-games, cowboy pool and the snare drum, clock track meets, paint in water colors, study his fellow man on street corners, and trade ideas about everything from college-girl fashions to Jake Kramer's backhand.

When he took over the editor's chair, Allen moved his secretary and another Harper's editor into the Manhattan office that his predecessor had occupied in lonely splendor. Every Tuesday the six editors, two part-time editors and anybody else who feels like it (including the office girl) crowd in, to hash over the next issue. Says Editor Allen: "I'm just the referee."

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