Viking Press

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][3]

Viking Press
Parent companyPenguin Random House
StatusActive
Founded1925 (1925)
FoundersHarold K. Guinzburg, George S. Oppenheim
Country of originUnited States
Headquarters locationNew York City
Key peoplePresident-Brian Tart, Children's publisher Kenneth Wright
Imprints
  • Viking Kestrel
  • Viking Adult
  • Viking children's Books
  • Viking Portable Library
Official websiteViking Books

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.”[4] B. W. Huebsch joined the firm shortly afterward. Harold Guinzburg's son Thomas became president in 1961.[4]

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 1961, 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, Viking Children's publisher is Kenneth Wright.[5]

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 1960s 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 has published 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.[6]

Imprints
  • Viking Kestrel
  • Viking Adult
  • Viking children's Books
  • Viking Portable Library

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 The Story of Ferdinand (1936), Make Way for Ducklings (1941), and The Twenty-One Balloons (1947). 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

Notable authors under other imprints

Notable editors

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
AuthorTitleEditor Year publishedNotes
Don DeLilloWhite NoiseMark Osteen 1998As of October 2019, the latest publication in the series.
Graham GreeneThe Quiet AmericanJohn Clark Pratt 1996
James JoyceDublinersRobert Scholes 1996
James JoycePortrait of the Artist as a Young ManChester G. Anderson 1977The only title known to include explanatory end notes.
Ken KeseyOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's NestJohn Clark Pratt 1977Out of print.
Jack KerouacOn the RoadScott Donaldson 1979Out of print.
Arthur MillerThe CrucibleGerald Weales 1996
Arthur MillerDeath of a SalesmanGerald Weales 1996
John SteinbeckThe Grapes of WrathKevin Hearle 1997

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
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References
  1. Kenneth T. Jackson; Lisa Keller; Nancy Flood (1995). The Encyclopedia of New York City: Second Edition. New York City: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300055368.
  2. Egli, ed. (1975). "Viking Press Is Sold To Penguin Books". School Library Journal. New York City: Media Source Inc. 22 (4): 16.
  3. Whitman, Alden (November 11, 1975). "Viking Press Is Sold to Penguin Books". The New York Times. New York City: The New York Times Company. Retrieved May 28, 2020.
  4. Weber, Bruce (September 10, 2010). "Thomas Guinzburg, Paris Review Co-Founder, Dies at 84". The New York Times. New York City: The New York Times Company. Retrieved September 13, 2010.
  5. "Viking Children's Books". Penguin Random House. Retrieved April 17, 2016.
  6. "Brian Tart | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Retrieved 2017-09-13.

Further reading

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.

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