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.
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. In 2023, Tamar Brazis was named v-p and publisher of Viking Children's Books.4
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 1970s and late 1990s, has been dormant since 1998, with no new titles released since then. However, a number of existing titles remain in print.
Titles| Author | Title | Editor | Year published | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Don DeLillo | White Noise | Mark Osteen | 1998 | . |
| Graham Greene | The Quiet American | John Clark Pratt | 1996 | |
| James Joyce | Dubliners | Robert Scholes | 1996 | |
| James Joyce | Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Chester G. Anderson | 1977 | The only title known to include explanatory end notes. |
| Ken Kesey | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | John Clark Pratt | 1977 | Out of print. |
| Jack Kerouac | On the Road | Scott Donaldson | 1979 | Out of print. |
| Arthur Miller | The Crucible | Gerald Weales | 1996 | |
| Arthur Miller | Death of a Salesman | Gerald Weales | 1996 | |
| John Steinbeck | The Grapes of Wrath | Kevin Hearle | 1997 |
Notable authors
- Abdullah II, King of Jordan
- Kingsley Amis
- Sherwood Anderson
- Hannah Arendt
- Peter S. Beagle
- 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
- Richard Osman
- 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
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)
References
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. 978-0300055368 ↩
Egli, ed. (1975). "Viking Press Is Sold To Penguin Books". School Library Journal. 22 (4). New York City: Media Source Inc.: 16. /wiki/School_Library_Journal ↩
Whitman, Alden (November 11, 1975). "Viking Press Is Sold to Penguin Books". The New York Times. New York City. Retrieved May 28, 2020. /wiki/Alden_Whitman ↩
Kantor, Emma. "Brazis, Santopolo promoted at Penguin Young Readers". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved March 6, 2024. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/91314-brazis-santopolo-promoted-at-penguin-young-readers.htm ↩