D. Appleton and Company

About D. Appleton and Company

D. Appleton and Company was a New York publisher, founded by Daniel Appleton in 1825 and independent until 1933, that issued the first book editions of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920).

Its founder, Daniel Appleton (1785 to 1849), ran a general store in Haverhill, Massachusetts, before moving to New York City in 1825, where he combined dry goods with importing books. He published his first book in 1831, and the business continued as D. Appleton & Co. after he retired in 1848, when his eldest son William Henry Appleton formed a partnership with his brothers.

Appleton became a major general and reference publisher. It issued the first American edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus (1880), Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1880), William Tecumseh Sherman's memoirs (1875), the six-volume Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1887) and American editions of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. The Red Badge of Courage appeared in October 1895 after a shortened serialisation in The Philadelphia Press in December 1894, and The Age of Innocence, published on 25 October 1920, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1900 the firm filed for bankruptcy, sold Popular Science and was reorganised.

In 1933 Appleton merged with the Century Company to form Appleton-Century, which joined F. S. Crofts in 1948 as Appleton-Century-Crofts. Meredith bought that firm in 1960, Prentice Hall took the textbook list in 1973, and the medical list continued as Appleton & Lange until McGraw-Hill bought it in 1999.