Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American
publishing company
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
owned by
Penguin Random House
Penguin Random House LLC is an Anglo-American multinational conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, from the merger of Penguin Group and Random House.
On April 2, 2020, Bertelsmann announced the completion of its purchase ...
. It was founded in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim
and then acquired by the
Penguin Group
Penguin Group is a British trade book publisher and part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. The new company was created by a merger that was finalised on 1 July 2013, with Bertelsmann initi ...
in 1975.
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."
B. W. Huebsch joined the firm shortly afterward. Harold Guinzburg's son
Thomas
Thomas may refer to:
People
* List of people with given name Thomas
* Thomas (name)
* Thomas (surname)
* Saint Thomas (disambiguation)
* Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, and Doctor of the Church
* Thomas the A ...
became president in 1961.
[
The firm's name and logo—a ]Viking ship
Viking ships were marine vessels of unique structure, used in Scandinavia from the Viking Age throughout the Middle Ages.
The boat-types were quite varied, depending on what the ship was intended for, but they were generally characterized as bein ...
drawn by Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882 – March 13, 1971) was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor, adventurer and voyager.
Biography
Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York. Kent was of English descent. He lived much of ...
—were meant to evoke the ideas of adventure, exploration, and enterprise implied by the word "Viking
Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden),
who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...
."
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
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Swedish industrialist, inventor and armaments (military weapons and equipment) manufacturer Alfred Nobel, along with the prizes in Chemistry, Physics, Physiolog ...
; Viking books have also won numerous Pulitzer Prizes
The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made ...
, National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors.
The Nat ...
s, and other important literary prizes.
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
Brian (sometimes spelled Bryan in English) is a male given name of Irish and Breton origin, as well as a surname of Occitan origin. It is common in the English-speaking world.
It is possible that the name is derived from an Old Celtic word mea ...
.
Imprints
* Viking Kestrel
* Viking Adult, who got in legal trouble in 1946 due to John Steinbeck’s bold eulogy, and fell out of public favor in 1947
* Viking children's Books
* Viking Portable Library
* Pamela Dorman Books
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
May Massee (May 1, 1881December 24, 1966) was an American children's book editor. She was the founding head of the juvenile departments at Doubleday from 1922 and at Viking Press from 1932. . Junior Books was later renamed Viking Children's Books. 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
''The Twenty-One Balloons'' is a novel by William Pène du Bois, published in 1947 by the Viking Press and awarded the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1948. The story is about a retired schoolteacher whose ill-f ...
'', written and illustrated by William Pene du Bois
William is a male given name of Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of Engl ...
(1947, Newbery medal winner for 1948), ''Corduroy
Corduroy is a textile with a distinctively raised "cord" or wale texture. Modern corduroy is most commonly composed of tufted cords, sometimes exhibiting a channel (bare to the base fabric) between them. Both velvet and corduroy derive from fu ...
'', ''Make Way for Ducklings
''Make Way for Ducklings'' is a children's picture book written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey. First published in 1941 by the Viking Press, the book tells the story of a pair of mallards who raise their brood of ducklings on an island in t ...
'', ''The Stinky Cheese Man
''The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales'' is a postmodern children's book written by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith. Published in 1992 by Viking, it is a collection of twisted, humorous parodies of famous children's stori ...
'' by Jon Scieszka
Jon Scieszka ( :) (born September 8, 1954) is an American children's writer, best known for picture books created with the illustrator Lane Smith. He is also a nationally recognized reading advocate, and the founder of Guys Read – a web-based li ...
and Lane Smith
Walter Lane Smith III (April 29, 1936 – June 13, 2005) was an American actor. His well-known roles included newspaper editor Perry White in the ABC series '' Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman'', Walter Warner in '' Son in Law'', co ...
(1993), '' The Outsiders'', ''Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Longstocking ( sv, Pippi Långstrump) is the fictional main character in an eponymous series of children's books by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. Pippi was named by Lindgren's daughter Karin, who asked her mother for a get-well story w ...
'', and ''The Story of Ferdinand
''The Story of Ferdinand'' (1936) is the best-known work by the American author Munro Leaf. Illustrated by Robert Lawson, the children's book tells the story of a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight in bullfights. He sits in the midd ...
''. Its paperbacks are now published by Puffin Books
Puffin Books is a longstanding children's imprint of the British publishers Penguin Books. Since the 1960s, it has been among the largest publishers of children's books in the UK and much of the English-speaking world. The imprint now belongs t ...
, which includes the Speak and Firebird
Firebird and fire bird may refer to:
Mythical birds
* Phoenix (mythology), sacred firebird found in the mythologies of many cultures
* Bennu, Egyptian firebird
* Huma bird, Persian firebird
* Firebird (Slavic folklore)
Bird species
''Various sp ...
imprints. From 2012 and , Viking Children's publisher is Kenneth Wright.
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
Notable authors
* Abdullah II
Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein ( ar, عبدالله الثاني بن الحسين , translit=ʿAbd Allāh aṯ-ṯānī ibn al-Ḥusayn; born 30 January 1962) is King of Jordan, having ascended the throne on 7 February 1999. He is a member of t ...
, King of Jordan
The king of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is Jordan's head of state and monarch. He serves as the head of the Jordanian monarchy—the Hashemite dynasty. The king is addressed as His Majesty ().
Jordan is a constitutional monarchy. However ...
* Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social a ...
* Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and ...
* Hannah Arendt
* Antony Beevor
Sir Antony James Beevor, (born 14 December 1946) is a British military historian. He has published several popular historical works on the Second World War and the Spanish Civil War.
Early life
Born in Kensington, Beevor was educated at tw ...
* Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only w ...
* Ludwig Bemelmans
Ludwig Bemelmans (April 27, 1898 – October 1, 1962) was an Austrian-American writer and illustrator of children's books and adult novels. He is known best for the ''Madeline'' picture books. Six were published, the first in 1939.
Early life
...
* Dan Blum
* T. C. Boyle
* Geraldine Brooks
* Daniel James Brown
* William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular cultur ...
* Lan Cao
Lan Cao (born 1961) is the author of the novels '' Monkey Bridge'' (1997) and '' The Lotus and the Storm'' (2014). She is also a professor of law at the Chapman University School of Law, specializing in international business and trade, internat ...
* Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash (born May 24, 1955) is an American singer-songwriter and author. She is the eldest daughter of country musician Johnny Cash and Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, Johnny Cash's first wife. Although she is often classified as a country art ...
* Ferreira de Castro
* J. M. Coetzee
John Maxwell Coetzee OMG (born 9 February 1940) is a South African–Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in ...
* Leonard Cohen
Leonard Norman Cohen (September 21, 1934November 7, 2016) was a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist. His work explored religion, politics, isolation, depression, sexuality, loss, death, and romantic relationships. He was inducted in ...
* Roald Dahl
* Theodore Draper
Theodore H. Draper (September 11, 1912 – February 21, 2006) was an American historian and political writer. Draper is best known for the 14 books he completed during his life, including work regarded as seminal on the formative period of the Ame ...
* Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence George Durrell (; 27 February 1912 – 7 November 1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. He was the eldest brother of naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell.
Born in India to British colonial p ...
* Kim Edwards
* Daniel Ellsberg
* Helen Fielding
Helen Fielding (born 19 February 1958) is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, and a sequence of novels and films beginning with the life of a thirty something singleton in Lo ...
* Frederick Forsyth
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth (born 25 August 1938) is an English novelist and journalist. He is best known for thrillers such as ''The Day of the Jackal'', ''The Odessa File'', '' The Fourth Protocol'', '' The Dogs of War'', ''The Devil's Alter ...
* Don Freeman
Don Freeman (August 11, 1908 – February 1, 1978) was an American painter, printmaker, cartoonist, and an illustrator and writer of children's books. He was active from the 1930s to the 1970s and often used Times Square as the backdrop of hi ...
* Tana French
Tana French (born 10 May 1973) is an American-Irish writer and theatrical actress. She is a longtime resident of Dublin, Ireland. Her debut novel '' In the Woods'' (2007), a psychological mystery, won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry ...
* Elizabeth George
Susan Elizabeth George (born February 26, 1949) is an American writer of mystery novels set in Great Britain.
She is best known for a series of novels featuring Inspector Thomas Lynley. The 21st book in the series appeared in January 2022. ...
* Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert (born July 18, 1969) is an American journalist and author. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, '' Eat, Pray, Love'', which has sold over 12 million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages. The book was also ma ...
* Rumer Godden
Margaret Rumer Godden (10 December 1907 – 8 November 1998) was an English author of more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books. Nine of her works have been made into films, most notably ''Black Narcissus'' in 1947 and '' The River'' in ...
* Will Gompertz
* Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquir ...
* R. K. Narayan
* Robert Greene
* Martha Grimes
Martha Grimes (born May 2, 1931) is an American writer of detective fiction. She is best known for a series featuring Richard Jury, a Scotland Yard inspector, and Melrose Plant, an aristocrat turned amateur sleuth.
Biography
Grimes was born i ...
* S. E. Hinton
* David Irving
David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author and Holocaust denier who has written on the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. His works include '' The Destruction of Dresden'' (1 ...
* Kristopher Jansma
* James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871June 26, 1938) was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peop ...
* James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
* Jan Karon
Jan Karon is an American novelist who writes for both adults and young readers. She is the author of the ''New York Times''-bestselling Mitford novels, featuring Father Timothy Kavanagh, an Episcopal priest, and the fictional village of Mitford. H ...
* Ezra Jack Keats
Ezra Jack Keats (né Jacob Ezra Katz; March 11, 1916 – May 6, 1983) was an American people, American writer and illustrator of children's books. He won the 1963 Caldecott Medal for illustrating ''The Snowy Day'', which he also wrote. Keats wr ...
* Garrison Keillor
* William Kennedy
* Jack Kerouac
* Ken Kesey
Ken Elton Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
Kesey was born in ...
* Sue Monk Kidd
* Stephen King
* Jamil Jan Kochai
* D. H. Lawrence
* Tobsha Learner
Tobsha Learner is a British/Australian novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Her first collection of short stories, ''Quiver'', sold 150,000 copies worldwide. She has sold over 790 thousand books and is in translation in a number of countries. H ...
* Rebecca Makkai
* Hilary Mantel
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel ( ; born Thompson; 6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Her first published novel, '' Every Day Is Mother's Day'', was relea ...
* Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and CIA Operative. A co-founder of the literary magazine ''The Paris Review'', he was the only writer to have won the Nation ...
* Robert McCloskey
John Robert McCloskey (September 15, 1914 – June 30, 2003) was an American writer and illustrator of children's books. He both wrote and illustrated eight picture books, and won two Caldecott Medals from the American Library Association for t ...
* Terry McMillan
Terry McMillan (born October 18, 1951) is an American novelist. Her work centers around the experiences of Black women in the United States.
Early life
McMillan was born in Port Huron, Michigan. She received a B.A. in journalism in 1977 from ...
* Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter in the 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are ''All My Sons'' (1947), '' Death of a Salesman'' (1 ...
* Jojo Moyes
* John Julius Norwich
* Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...
* Michelle Obama
* Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1977 Jerusalem Prize, the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and ...
* Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
...
* Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. ( , ; born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, scie ...
* Ruth Sawyer
Ruth Sawyer (August 5, 1880 – June 3, 1970) was an American storyteller and a writer of fiction and non-fiction for children and adults. She may be best known as the author of ''Roller Skates'', which won the 1937 Newbery Medal. She received th ...
* Jon Scieszka
Jon Scieszka ( :) (born September 8, 1954) is an American children's writer, best known for picture books created with the illustrator Lane Smith. He is also a nationally recognized reading advocate, and the founder of Guys Read – a web-based li ...
* Kate Seredy
Kate Seredy (November 10, 1899 – March 7, 1975) was a Hungarian-born writer and illustrator of children's books. She won the Newbery Medal once, the Newbery Honor twice, the Caldecott Honor once, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Most of her bo ...
* Katherine Binney Shippen
* Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in sever ...
* Wallace Stegner
Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalism, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U. ...
* John Steinbeck
* Rex Stout
Rex Todhunter Stout (; December 1, 1886 – October 27, 1975) was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. His best-known characters are the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin, who were featured in 33 novels and ...
* August Strindberg
Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter.Lane (1998), 1040. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty p ...
* Simms Taback
* Whitney Terrell
* Barbara Tuchman
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (; January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for ''The Guns of August'' (1962), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World ...
* Carl Van Doren
Carl Clinton Van Doren (September 10, 1885 – July 18, 1950) was an American critic and biographer. He was the brother of critic and teacher Mark Van Doren and the uncle of Charles Van Doren.
He won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autob ...
* William T. Vollmann
* David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel '' Infinite Jest'', whi ...
* Rosemary Wells
Rosemary Wells (born January 29, 1943) is an American writer and illustrator of children's books. She is well known for using animal characters to address real human issues. Some of her most well-known characters are Max & Ruby (later adapted into ...
* Rebecca West
Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books ...
* Patrick White
* Vikram Sampath
Notable editors
* Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, consulting editor
* Wendy Wolf, vice president and associate editor, 1994-
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
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.
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
at Penguin (page from April 26, 2008 stored by the Internet Archive)
{{Authority control
Book publishing companies based in New York (state)
Publishing companies based in New York City
Publishing companies established in 1925
1925 establishments in New York City
1975 mergers and acquisitions
Random House