Charles Scribner's Sons

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Scribner's Sons has spent nearly two centuries at the center of American literature, publishing names that now appear on high school syllabi and library shelves alike: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Thomas Wolfe, and Stephen King, among many others. Founded in 1846 in New York City, the firm outlasted its founding family, changed hands multiple times, and survived merger after merger. It began on a handshake between two men and grew into one of the most storied imprints in the English-speaking world. How did a small partnership started in the mid-1800s become the home of so many defining American voices? And what does it mean that the Scribner name, born from a single family's ambition, now belongs to a corporation that never met a Scribner?

• 2. Baker, Scribner, and a Name

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  Charles Scribner I and Isaac D. Baker founded the firm in 1846, calling it Baker & Scribner. The partnership lasted only a few years. After Baker died, Scribner bought out the remaining stake and renamed the company the Charles Scribner Company. That act of renaming was the first of many that would follow the firm across nearly two centuries.

  Each of the brothers would serve as president in turn, a dynastic succession that stretched from 1846 all the way through 1984, when Charles Scribner IV handed the company over through merger. That unbroken line of family leadership, spanning six presidents across more than a century, gave the firm a continuity that few publishers could match.

• 3. Magazines and the Press

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  In 1865, a decade and a half into its existence, the firm made its first move into magazine publishing with Hours at Home. Five years later, the Scribners organized a separate company to publish a magazine called Scribner's Monthly. That venture ran until 1881, when the family sold the magazine operation to outside investors; the buyers renamed it the Century Magazine, and the Scribner brothers were legally barred from publishing any magazine for a period.

  St. Nicholas Magazine, launched in 1873, became one of the firm's most celebrated periodical ventures. Mary Mapes Dodge served as editor, and Frank R. Stockton worked alongside her as assistant editor. The magazine built a strong reputation as a children's publication before it too passed out of family hands.

  In 1886, the legal prohibition expired, and the brothers launched Scribner's Magazine. The firm's physical home during those years was the Scribner Building, constructed in 1893 on lower Fifth Avenue at 21st Street. A later headquarters on Fifth Avenue in midtown followed. Both buildings were designed by Ernest Flagg in a Beaux Arts style, giving the company an architectural presence as distinctive as its literary one.

• 4. Maxwell Perkins and the Authors

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  The editors who worked under the Scribner umbrella shaped the canon of American fiction as much as any critic or prize committee. Maxwell Perkins and John Hall Wheelock are credited in the firm's own history with shepherding some of the most significant names of the twentieth century: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Erskine Caldwell, S. S. Van Dine, James Jones, and Alan Paton all appeared on the Scribner list during that era.

  Edith Wharton and Henry James were published under Charles Scribner II specifically. Kenneth Grahame, Ring Lardner, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings also found their American publisher here. Reinhold Niebuhr and Susanne Langer brought philosophical weight to a list already dense with fiction.

  The children's book division, established in 1934 under Alice Dalgliesh, extended that reach. N.C. Wyeth, Marcia Brown, Will James, and Leo Politi all contributed to the division's catalog. Robert A. Heinlein, whose name would later become synonymous with science fiction, was also published there during those years.

• 5. Mergers and Ownership

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  In 1978, Scribner merged with Atheneum, creating an entity called The Scribner Book Companies. Six years later, in 1984, that combined company merged into Macmillan Inc. Then in 1994, Simon & Schuster bought Macmillan. Each transaction reshuffled what the Scribner name attached to.

  After the Simon & Schuster deal, the adult lists of Macmillan and Atheneum were folded into Scribner's, while the Scribner children's list was absorbed into Atheneum. The trade division dropped the possessive and the plural to become simply Scribner, retained by Simon & Schuster. The reference division, along with the Charles Scribner's Sons trademarks, moved in a different direction: sold as part of Simon & Schuster's Macmillan Library Reference unit to Pearson in 1998, resold to the Thomson Corporation a year later, and then placed inside Gale. Thomson Learning, including Gale, became Cengage Group in 2007. Simon & Schuster has licensed the Scribner trademark for trade publishing from Gale ever since.

  In 2012, Simon & Schuster reorganized its adult imprints into four divisions. Scribner became the Scribner Publishing Group and absorbed Touchstone Books, which had previously been part of Free Press. Susan Moldow, who had served as publisher from 1994 to 2012, became president of the new division. Nan Graham holds the publisher role today.

• 6. The Modern List

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  Under the Simon & Schuster era, the Scribner name has continued to attract writers whose work defines their moment. Annie Proulx, Anthony Doerr, Don DeLillo, Frank McCourt, Jeannette Walls, and Andrew Solomon all appear on the current list. Stephen King has published new releases with Scribner since 1998; re-releases in the United States and Canada have appeared there since 2016.

  Scribner titles and authors have earned Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards in the modern period. The Scribner Bookstores, which at some point bore the family name on retail storefronts, are now owned by Barnes & Noble. The reference trademarks and the Charles Scribner's Sons name itself are held by Cengage Group, while the trade imprint sits with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts following its acquisition of Simon & Schuster. The family that named the firm is long gone from its management. What remains is a list, and the authors on it.