The Harvard Advocate, founded in 1866, is the oldest continuously published collegiate literary magazine in the country. Over its long history, it can count T.S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, and Norman Mailer among its members and e.e. cummings, Jack Kerouac, and Tom Wolfe as contributors to its pages. A quarterly magazine, The Advocate's mission is to publish the best art, fiction, poetry, and prose that the Harvard undergraduate community offers.

When the Advocate was founded, it adopted the motto Dulce est Periculum (Danger is Sweet) which had been used by an earlier Harvard newspaper, the Collegian. The magazine originally avoided controversial topics, lest it be shut down by university authorities; by the time the editors were making the then-radical demand for coeducation at Harvard, the magazine had attracted the support of James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and its life was less precarious.

The founding in 1873 of The Harvard Crimson newspaper (originally the Magenta), and in 1876, of the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine, led the Advocate by the 1880s to devote itself to essays, fiction, and poetry.

Over the years, the undergraduate editors of and contributors to the Advocate have gone on to later fame, literary and otherwise. Theodore Roosevelt edited the magazine in 1880. Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, and T. S. Eliot all published their undergraduate poetry in the Advocate. Before World War II, undergraduates who worked on the Advocate included Malcolm Cowley, James Agee, Robert Fitzgerald, Leonard Bernstein, James Laughlin (who got into trouble with local police for publishing a racy story by Henry Miller) and Norman Mailer.

The Harvard Advocate can be reached at 21 South Street, Cambridge, and at president@theharvardadvocate.com