Free Press

About Free Press

Free Press was an American publisher of social science, politics and business books, founded in 1947 by Jeremiah Kaplan and Charles Liebman and run as an imprint of Simon & Schuster from 1994.

The firm began as The Free Press of Glencoe, based in Glencoe, Illinois, with a list centred on sociology and religion. Its first books included Durkheim's The Division of Labor and Weber's The Theory of Economic and Social Organization,. Robert Merton's Social Theory and Social Structure (1957) appeared in the Glencoe years. Macmillan bought the firm in 1960 for $1.3 million, and Kaplan moved to New York to run it.

Under Macmillan the house published Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations (1962). Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. From 1983 the publisher Erwin Glikes gave the list a conservative reputation, with Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind among its best sellers, and later Free Press titles included Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and The Bell Curve (1994).

Simon & Schuster took over Free Press when it acquired Macmillan in 1994. Martha Levin became publisher in 2001 and added fiction: Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. On 23 October 2012 Simon & Schuster reorganised its adult imprints, moving Free Press into Jonathan Karp's Simon & Schuster Publishing Group; Levin left and the imprint stopped operating as a separate house, although some books still carry the Free Press name.