Viking Press
 | |
| Parent company | Penguin Random House |
|---|---|
| Status | Active |
| Founded | 1925 (1925) |
| Founders | Harold K. Guinzburg, George S. Oppenheim |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | New York City, New York |
| Key people | President-Brian Tart, Children's publisher Kenneth Wright |
| Imprints | Pamela Dorman |
| Official website | penguin.com/publishers/vikingbooks/ |
Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company now owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim[1] and then acquired by the Penguin Group in 1975.[2]
Contents
1 History
1.1 Series
1.1.1 Viking Critical Library
2 Notable editors
3 Notable authors
4 Viking Children's
4.1 Notable authors
4.2 Awards
5 References
6 External links
History
Guinzburg, a Harvard graduate and former employee of Simon and Schuster and Oppenheimer, a graduate of Williams College and Alfred A. Knopf, founded Viking in 1925 with the goal of publishing nonfiction and “distinguished fiction with some claim to permanent importance rather than ephemeral popular interest.”[3]B. W. Huebsch joined the firm shortly afterward. Harold Guinzburg's son Thomas became president in 1961.[3]
The firm's name and logo—a Viking ship drawn by Rockwell Kent—were meant to evoke the ideas of adventure, exploration, and enterprise implied by the word "Viking."
In August of that year, they acquired H.B. Huesbsch, which maintained a list of backlist titles from authors such as James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson. The first imprint was The Book of American Negro Spirituals, edited by James Weldon Johnson. The young firm focused on aggressive advertising and a liberal return policy. These policies, along with popular fiction authors Dorothy Parker, D.H. Lawrence and Erskine Caldwell, as well as non-fiction authors Bertrand Russell and Mohandis Gandhi, helped the firm weather the Depression.
The house has been home to many prominent authors of fiction, non-fiction, and play scripts. Five Viking authors have been awarded Nobel Prizes for Literature and one received the Nobel Peace Prize; Viking books have also won numerous Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and other important literary prizes.
The Viking Children's Book department was established in 1933; its founding editor was May Massee. Viking Kestrel was one of its imprints. Its books have won the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, and include such books as The Twenty-One Balloons, written and illustrated by William Pene du Bois (1947, Newbery medal winner for 1948), Corduroy, Make Way for Ducklings, The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (1993), The Outsiders, Pippi Longstocking, and The Story of Ferdinand. Its paperbacks are now published by Puffin Books, which includes the Speak and Firebird imprints. From 2012 and as of 2016[update], Viking Children's publisher is Kenneth Wright.[4]
In 1943, the Viking Portable Library was introduced, a series designed to provide compact, well-printed anthologies for the general reader and college students. These compilations encompassed works by Hemingway, Steinbeck and Shakespeare. Over the next decade, Viking published works by Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Rumer Godden and Rex Stout. Saul Bellow published his third novel, The Adventure of Augie March in 1953, and would publish his next five works with the press, including the Pulitzer Prize winning Humboldt's Gift in 1975. In 1957, Jack Kerouac's On the Road was published by the press, and during the 1960's Viking published works by Hannah Arendt, Theodore Draper, Zbignew Brzezinski, Ian Fleming, Ken Kesey, and Jimmy Breslin.
Viking publishes approximately 75 books a year. It is notable for publishing both successful commercial fiction and acclaimed literary fiction and non-fiction, and its paperbacks are most often published by Penguin Books. Viking's current president is Brian Tart.[5]
Series
Viking Critical Library
The Viking Critical Library offers academic editions of literary texts. Like W. W. Norton's Norton Critical Editions, all titles print the text alongside a selection of critical essays and contextual documents (including relevant extracts from the author's oeuvre). The series, which only saw sporadic publications in the late '70s and late '90s, has been dormant since 1998, with no new titles released since then. However, a number of existing titles remain in print.
- Titles
| Author | Title | Editor | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Don DeLillo | White Noise | Mark Osteen | Published in 1998. As of September 2018, the latest publication in the series. |
| Graham Greene | The Quiet American | John Clark Pratt | Published in 1996. |
| James Joyce | Dubliners | Robert Scholes | Published in 1996. |
| James Joyce | Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Chester G. Anderson | Published in 1977. The only title which includes explanatory end notes. |
| Ken Kesey | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | John Clark Pratt | Published in 1977. Out of print. |
| Jack Kerouac | On the Road | Scott Donaldson | Published in 1979. Out of print. |
| Arthur Miller | The Crucible | Gerald Weales | Published in 1996. |
| Arthur Miller | Death of a Salesman | Gerald Weales | Published in 1996. |
| John Steinbeck | The Grapes of Wrath | Kevin Hearle | Published in 1997. |
Notable editors
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Consulting Editor
Notable authors
Abdullah II, King of Jordan
- Kingsley Amis
- Sherwood Anderson
- Hannah Arendt
- Antony Beevor
- Saul Bellow
- Ludwig Bemelmans
- Dan Blum
- T. C. Boyle
- Geraldine Brooks
- Daniel James Brown
- William S. Burroughs
- Lan Cao
- Rosanne Cash
- Ferreira de Castro
- J.M. Coetzee
- Leonard Cohen
- Theodore Draper
- Lawrence Durrell
- Kim Edwards
- Daniel Ellsberg
- Helen Fielding
- Frederick Forsyth
- Tana French
- Elizabeth George
- Elizabeth Gilbert
- Rumer Godden
- Will Gompertz
- Graham Greene
- Robert Greene
- Martha Grimes
- David Irving
- Kristopher Jansma
- James Weldon Johnson
- James Joyce
- Jan Karon
- Garrison Keillor
- William Kennedy
- Jack Kerouac
- Ken Kesey
- Sue Monk Kidd
- Stephen King
- D.H. Lawrence
- Tobsha Learner
- Hilary Mantel
- Peter Matthiessen
- Terry McMillan
- Arthur Miller
- Jojo Moyes
- Octavio Paz
- Steven Pinker
- Thomas Pynchon
- Kate Seredy
- Wallace Stegner
- John Steinbeck
- Rex Stout
- August Strindberg
- Whitney Terrell
- Barbara Tuchman
- Carl Van Doren
- William T. Vollmann
- David Foster Wallace
- Rebecca West
- Patrick White
Viking Children's
In 1933, Viking Press founded a department called Junior Books to publish children's books. The first book published was The Story About Ping in 1933 under editor May Massee. Other stories published under the Viking label early in its history include Make Way for Ducklings (1941), The Twenty-One Balloons (1947) and The Story of Ferdinand (1936). Junior Books was renamed to Viking Children's Books at some point in the past. It currently publishes approximately sixty titles a year.
Notable authors
- Ludwig Bemelmans
- Roald Dahl
- Don Freeman
- S. E. Hinton
- Ezra Jack Keats
- Robert McCloskey
- Ruth Sawyer
- Jon Scieszka
- Katherine Binney Shippen
- Simms Taback
- Rosemary Wells
Awards
- 10 Newbery Medals
- 10 Caldecott Medals
- 27 Newbery Honors
- 33 Caldecott Honors
- 1 American Book Award
- 2 Coretta Scott King Awards
- 3 Batcheldor Honors
- 5 Christopher Medals
- 2 Margaret A. Edwards Awards for authors S. E. Hinton and Richard Peck
References
^ Kenneth T. Jackson; Lisa Keller; Nancy Flood (1995). The Encyclopedia of New York City: Second Edition. New York: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300055368..mw-parser-output cite.citation{font-style:inherit}.mw-parser-output .citation q{quotes:"""""""'""'"}.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-free a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Lock-green.svg/9px-Lock-green.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-registration a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-gray-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-subscription a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-red-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration{color:#555}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription span,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration span{border-bottom:1px dotted;cursor:help}.mw-parser-output .cs1-ws-icon a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg/12px-Wikisource-logo.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output code.cs1-code{color:inherit;background:inherit;border:inherit;padding:inherit}.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error{display:none;font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error{font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-maint{display:none;color:#33aa33;margin-left:0.3em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration,.mw-parser-output .cs1-format{font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-left{padding-left:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-right{padding-right:0.2em}
^ Egli, ed. (1975). "Viking Press Is Sold To Penguin Books". School Library Journal. 22 (4): 16.
^ ab Weber, Bruce. "Thomas Guinzburg, Paris Review Co-Founder, Dies at 84", The New York Times, September 10, 2010. Accessed September 13, 2010.
^ "Viking Children's Books". Penguin Random House. Retrieved April 17, 2016.
^ "Brian Tart | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Retrieved 2017-09-13.
Bean, Martha Sue. A History and Profile of the Viking Press, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Theses, 1969.
"Viking Press, Viking Penguin", Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 46, pp. 365-368.
External links
Viking Press overview at Penguin
Viking Press history at Penguin (page from August 28, 2006 stored by the Internet Archive)
Viking Children's Books overview at Penguin
Viking Children's Books history at Penguin (page from April 26, 2008 stored by the Internet Archive)
