Henry Beard
American writer, co-founder and editor of National Lampoon
Henry Nichols Beard (born June 7, 1945) is an American humorist, one of the founders of the magazine National Lampoon and the author of several best-selling books.
Life and career
Beard, a great-grandson of 14th Vice President John C. Breckinridge, was born into a well-to-do family and grew up at the Westbury Hotel on East 69th Street in Manhattan. His relationship with his parents was cool, to judge by his quip, "I never saw my mother up close."
He graduated from the Taft School in 1963, where he was a leader at the humor magazine, and he decided to become a humor writer after reading Catch-22.
He then went to Harvard University (from which he graduated in 1967) and joined its humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon, which circulated nationally. Much of the credit for the Lampoon's success during the mid-1960s is given to Beard and Douglas Kenney, who was in the class a year after Beard's. In 1968, Beard and Kenney wrote the successful parody Bored of the Rings. Beard and Kenney would become longtime friends and collaborators. Kenney described Beard as "the oldest guy who was ever a teenager".
In 1969, Beard, Kenney and Rob Hoffman became the founding editors of the National Lampoon, which reached an average monthly circulation of over 830,000 for the year 1974 (and the October issue of that year topped a million sales). One of Beard's short stories published there, "The Last Recall", was included in the 1973 Best Detective Stories of the Year.
“Henry Beard” enters the record as american writer, co-founder and editor of National Lampoon. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Henry, Beard and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5717932. VIAF identifies the subject as 94470954. The Library of Congress control number is n81016734. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1963, 1967 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henry Beard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.