Editors saw him as youthful but dependable. Lewis Lapham, the longtime editor-in-chief of Harper’s, assigned him as a contributing editor of the magazine, a distinction he held for five years. “I trusted Johnny; I liked his sensibility,” Lapham told me. “Very early on, you hear a writer’s voice and you understand the first-person singular. . . . It was because of the way he writes.”
Steve Weddle 