Short answers, pulled from the story.
Pantheon Books was founded in 1942 in New York City by Kurt and Helen Wolff, who had come to the United States to escape fascism and the Holocaust. They built the imprint around introducing progressive European works to American readers.
André Schiffrin was asked to resign in February 1990 after he refused to reduce the number of titles published by Pantheon or to trim the imprint's thirty-member staff. The request came from Random House president Alberto Vitale, a former banker who had replaced Robert L. Bernstein in December 1989.
Authors including Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Princeton historian Arno Mayer, and Barbara Ehrenreich held a protest outside Random House in March 1990. They argued that forcing out Schiffrin amounted to corporate censorship of books that would not exist without him.
Bertelsmann purchased Random House in 1998 for $1.4 billion, bringing Pantheon Books and numerous other imprints under its ownership. The acquisition made Bertelsmann the largest publisher of American books and the largest publisher of English-language trade books.
Pantheon published Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman in 1986, one of its first original graphic novels. Later titles include The Acme Novelty Library by Chris Ware in 2000, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi in 2003, and Black Hole by Charles Burns in 2005, among many others.
Schiffrin published a memoir in 2000 titled The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. In it he accused those with money-making interests of homogenizing the publishing industry and warned that the resulting control on the spread of ideas is stricter than anyone would have thought possible in a free society.