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History of Harcourt Trade Publishers |
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The Founding of Harcourt Brace, 1919 |
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The headline news in the last week of July in 1919 dealt with race riots that were raging in the city of Chicago. President Wilson urged Congressional support for the Versailles Treaty.
It was feared that the Bolshevik rule in Russia would now extend to Hungary. Treasury Secretary Carter Glass reported that Federal expenditures and revenues for the year 1920 were projected to balance each
other at $6.5 billion. It was warm and sunny in New York City, with temperatures in the high 80s.
On that hot July day in 1919, a taxicab pulled up to the curb on West 47th Street and the entire work force of Harcourt Brace & Company, former Henry Holt & Co. employees Alfred Harcourt and Ellen
Knowles Eayrs, had arrived for the first day of work in their new office. Former Henry Holt co-worker Donald Brace was not far behind to fill his role as Co-Founder of the new company.
The very first book published by Harcourt Brace & Company was Organizing for Work by H. L. Gantt, a treatise on how to achieve efficiency
in business. Also on the first Harcourt Brace book list were two former Henry Holt authors who were to have a long association with the company, Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sandburg. On
January 22, 1920, Harcourt Brace & Company published The Economic Consequence of the Peace by British author and economist John Maynard Keynes,
the company's first bestseller. That fall, Sinclair Lewis' small-town novel, Main Street, hit the bestseller lists and eventually sold more
than ten times the 40,000 copies projected by Alfred Harcourt. By the end of its first full year in existence, 1920, Harcourt Brace & Company had become a major force in American publishing.
Over the years, Harcourt expanded to include many notable authors, such as Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, George
Orwell, C.S. Lewis, William Golding, Malcolm Lowry, Stephen Spender,
Dorothy Sayers, Kingsley Amis, Arthur C. Clarke, Cyril Connolly, James
Morris, and Anthony Burgess.
Just as Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace populated their first publishing list with former Henry Holt & Co. authors, they also populated their first office staff with former Holt employees. The most
notable member of this "Holt" contingent was Ellen Knowles Eayrs. She had been Alfred Harcourt's assistant at Holt and continued this position at the inception of Harcourt Brace & Company.
Ellen Knowles Eayrs established the children's book department which became one of the most prestigious and successful parts of the company. By 1920 she had been elected to the board of directors, becoming
the first woman in publishing to hold such a position. She later married Alfred Harcourt and established the Alfred Harcourt and Ellen Knowles Harcourt Awards in Biography and Memoirs which is given annually
by Columbia University.
With each passing decade, new opportunities and accolades presented themselves: Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930); T. S.
Eliot, another eventual Nobel recipient (1948), joined the list; acquisitions of other publishers' lists brought authors Amelia Earhart, P.
L. Travers, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to the house. By the time 1950 arrived, Harcourt Brace & Company had published the memoirs of Thomas
Merton, the poetry of Robert Lowell, the fiction of James Gould Couzzens, and three of the most notable books of the century: George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.
By 1955 both Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace had passed away, and William Jovanovich was president of the company. Jovanovich had previously joined as a textbook representative and worked his way up the
ranks. The trade list remained strong, with authors such as E. M. Forster, Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, and William Golding (1983 Nobel Prize winner).
In the mid-1960s the company continued to garner awards. Katherine Anne Porter won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her Collected Stories. Two co-publishers joined the company: Helen and Kurt Wolff, co-founders of Pantheon, brought with them the finest of international authors and intellectual life, including Günter Grass (1999 Nobel Prize winner), Hannah Arendt, Konrad Lorenz, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Hiram Hadyn, a co-founder of the former Atheneum, also brought along new authors such as Anaïs Nin and Alice Walker.
Today, Harcourt Trade Publishers (also formerly Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) continues to grow strong and to embrace fine writers including Margaret Drabble, Umberto
Eco, Edward Gorey, Michel Faber, Daniel Keyes, Ursula
K. Le Guin, Yann Martel, Audrey Niffenegger, Amos Oz, Octavio Paz (1990 Nobel Prize winner), José Saramago (1998
Nobel Prize winner), Rachel Simmons, Wyslawa
Szymborska (1996 Nobel Prize winner), Richard Wilbur, and many others. The Harcourt Children's Books imprint features such notable authors and illustrators as Avi (2003 Newbery Medal winner), Janell Cannon, Margaret Chodos-Irvine (2004 Caldecott Honor recipient), David Diaz (1995 Caldecott Medal winner), Edward Eager, Lois Ehlert, Eleanor Estes, Mem Fox, Gerald McDermott (1994 Caldecott Honor recipient), Mary Norton, Han Nolan (1997 National Book Award winner), David Shannon (1999 Caldecott Honor recipient), Janet Stevens (1996 Caldecott Honor recipient), Don and Audrey Wood (1986 Caldecott Honor recipients), and many more.
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Last Updated: 6/5/2008
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