Early Publishing Houses

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Scribner’s—known more for its magazine in the late 1800s than for its books—became the most prestigious literary house of the 1920s and 1930s, publishing F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925) and Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, 1926).

The modern book industry in the United States developed gradually in the 1800s with the formation of “prestigious” publishing houses: companies that identified and produced the works of respected writers.3 The oldest American houses included J. B. Lippincott (1792); Harper & Bros. (1817), which became Harper & Row in 1962 and HarperCollins in 1990; Houghton Mifflin (1832); Little, Brown (1837); G. P. Putnam (1838); Scribner’s (1842); E. P. Dutton (1852); Rand McNally (1856); and Macmillan (1869).

Between 1880 and 1920, as more people moved from rural areas to cities and learned to read, Americans became interested in reading all kinds of books—novels, historical accounts, reference materials, instructional resources. This caught the attention of entrepreneurs eager to profit by satisfying this demand. A savvy breed of publishing house—focused on marketing—was born. These firms included Doubleday & McClure Company (1897), the McGraw-Hill Book Company (1909), Prentice-Hall (1913), Alfred A. Knopf (1915), Simon & Schuster (1924), and Random House (1925).