Viking Press

Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheimer and then acquired by the Penguin Group 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 became president in 1961.
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.
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.
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. 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, 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 , 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, 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
Roald Dahl
Theodore Draper
Lawrence Durrell
Kim Edwards
Daniel Ellsberg
Helen Fielding
Frederick Forsyth
Don Freeman
Tana French
Elizabeth George
Elizabeth Gilbert
Rumer Godden
Will Gompertz
Graham Greene
R. K. Narayan
Robert Greene
Martha Grimes
S. E. Hinton
David Irving
Kristopher Jansma
James Weldon Johnson
James Joyce
Jan Karon
Ezra Jack Keats
Garrison Keillor
William Kennedy
Jack Kerouac
Ken Kesey
Sue Monk Kidd
Stephen King
Jamil Jan Kochai
D. H. Lawrence
Tobsha Learner
Rebecca Makkai
Hilary Mantel
Peter Matthiessen
Robert McCloskey
Terry McMillan
Arthur Miller
Jojo Moyes
John Julius Norwich
Barack Obama
Michelle Obama
Octavio Paz
Steven Pinker
Thomas Pynchon
Ruth Sawyer
Jon Scieszka
Kate Seredy
Katherine Binney Shippen
Upton Sinclair
Wallace Stegner
John Steinbeck
Rex Stout
August Strindberg
Simms Taback
Whitney Terrell
Barbara Tuchman
Carl Van Doren
William T. Vollmann
David Foster Wallace
Rosemary Wells
Rebecca West
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
Viking Children's Books history at Penguin (page from April 26, 2008 stored by the Internet Archive)
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