Lewis H. Lapham is the founding Editor of Lapham's Quarterly and the Editor Emeritus of Harper's. His columns received the National Magazine Award in 1995 for exhibiting "an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity", and, in 2002, the Thomas Paine Journalism Award. He was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editor's Hall of Fame in 2007. His other books include Money and Class in America, Fortune's Child, Imperial Masquerade, The Wish for Kings, Hotel America, Waiting for the Barbarians, Theater of War, The Agony of Mammon, Gag Rule, Pretensions to Empire, and Age of Folly.

Note - all monetary values here are in 1985 dollars, less than half of the amount adjusted for inflation in the period to 2018.

At Yale University in the middle 1950's the man whom I prefer to call George Amory I knew chiefly by virtue of his reputation for wrecking automobiles. He was the heir to what was said to be a large Long Island fortune, and I remember him as a blond and handsome tennis player embodying the ideal of insouciant elegance seen in a tailor's window. During the whole of our senior year I doubt that I spoke to Amory more than once or twice; we would likely have seen one another in a crowd, probably at a fraternity beer party, and I assume that we exchanged what we thought were witty observations about the differences between the girls from Vassar and those from Smith. At random intervals during the 1960's and 1970's I heard rumors of Amory's exploits in the stock market and the south of France, but I hadn't seen him for almost thirty years when, shortly after President Reagan's second inaugural in the winter of 1985, I ran across him in the bar of the Plaza Hotel. He seemed somehow smaller than I remembered, not as blond or as careless. Ordinarily we would have nodded at one another without a word of recognition, and I remember being alarmed when Amory carried his drink to my table and abruptly began to recite what he apparently regarded as the epic poem of his economic defeat. Presumably he chose me as his confessor because we scarcely knew each other, much less belonged to the same social circles. I wasn't apt to repeat what I heard to anybody whom he thought important enough to matter.

"I'm nothing", he said. "You understand that, nothing. I earn $250,000 a year, but it's nothing, and I'm nobody".

Amory at Yale had assumed that the world would entertain him as its guest. He had little reason to think otherwise. Together with his grandmother's collection of impressionist paintings and the houses in Southampton and Maine, he looked forward to inheriting a substantial income. Certainly it never had occurred to him that he might be obliged to suffer the indignity of balancing his checkbook or looking at a bill.

Lewis H. Lapham is the founding Editor of Lapham's Quarterly and the Editor Emeritus of Harper's. His columns received the National Magazine Award in 1995 for exhibiting "an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity", and, in 2002, the Thomas Paine Journalism Award. He was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editor's Hall of Fame in 2007. His other books include Money and Class in America, Fortune's Child, Imperial Masquerade, The Wish for Kings, Hotel America, Waiting for the Barbarians, Theater of War, The Agony of Mammon, Gag Rule, Pretensions to Empire, and Age of Folly.

Note - all monetary values here are in 1985 dollars, less than half of the amount adjusted for inflation in the period to 2018.

At Yale University in the middle 1950's the man whom I prefer to call George Amory I knew chiefly by virtue of his reputation for wrecking automobiles. He was the heir to what was said to be a large Long Island fortune, and I remember him as a blond and handsome tennis player embodying the ideal of insouciant elegance seen in a tailor's window. During the whole of our senior year I doubt that I spoke to Amory more than once or twice; we would likely have seen one another in a crowd, probably at a fraternity beer party, and I assume that we exchanged what we thought were witty observations about the differences between the girls from Vassar and those from Smith. At random intervals during the 1960's and 1970's I heard rumors of Amory's exploits in the stock market and the south of France, but I hadn't seen him for almost thirty years when, shortly after President Reagan's second inaugural in the winter of 1985, I ran across him in the bar of the Plaza Hotel. He seemed somehow smaller than I remembered, not as blond or as careless. Ordinarily we would have nodded at one another without a word of recognition, and I remember being alarmed when Amory carried his drink to my table and abruptly began to recite what he apparently regarded as the epic poem of his economic defeat. Presumably he chose me as his confessor because we scarcely knew each other, much less belonged to the same social circles. I wasn't apt to repeat what I heard to anybody whom he thought important enough to matter.

"I'm nothing", he said. "You understand that, nothing. I earn $250,000 a year, but it's nothing, and I'm nobody".

Amory at Yale had assumed that the world would entertain him as its guest. He had little reason to think otherwise. Together with his grandmother's collection of impressionist paintings and the houses in Southampton and Maine, he looked forward to inheriting a substantial income. Certainly it never had occurred to him that he might be obliged to suffer the indignity of balancing his checkbook or looking at a bill.