Beacon Press

About Beacon Press

Beacon Press is a non-profit publisher in Boston, founded in 1854 by the American Unitarian Association and now run as a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association, known for serious non-fiction on religion, race, politics and social justice.

Beacon's books appear under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. Its early list was mostly religious, often written by Unitarian ministers, and in the early 1900s it widened into ethics, social reform and peace. After the Second World War it published James Baldwin's essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and work by Howard Zinn and Jürgen Habermas. Other notable titles include Martin Luther King Jr.'s Where Do We Go from Here, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology, Cornel West's Race Matters and the poetry of Mary Oliver.

In 1971, after other publishers had declined, Beacon published the Senator Gravel edition of The Pentagon Papers in five volumes, the first time the papers appeared as a book. A Unitarian Universalist leader later said this brought years of harassment from the Nixon administration, and in Gravel v. United States the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional protection covering Senator Gravel and his aide did not extend to Beacon.

More recent successes include Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility (26 June 2018). Beacon describes itself as independent, is a member of the Association of University Presses, and is distributed by Penguin Random House Publisher Services.