Harcourt

About Harcourt

Harcourt was a New York, later San Diego, publishing house founded in 1919 by Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace, with the editor Will David Howe, and it was absorbed into Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2007.

The firm began as Harcourt, Brace and Howe and became Harcourt, Brace and Company when Howe left in 1921. A merger with the World Book Company produced Harcourt, Brace & World in 1960, and in 1970 it became Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. It was later known simply as Harcourt Brace and, from 1999, Harcourt, Inc. It was based in New York until 1982 and was last headquartered in San Diego.

Its authors included Sinclair Lewis, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, James Thurber, George Orwell, Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men), Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Günter Grass and Umberto Eco. Its children's division published Mary Poppins, The Borrowers and Half Magic, and it issued the first hardback of Ursula K. Le Guin's Tales from Earthsea (2001).

General Cinema Corporation, later Harcourt General, bought the company in 1991, and Reed Elsevier acquired it in 2001. In 2007 Houghton Mifflin bought Harcourt's educational divisions, and the combined company took the name Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; the Harcourt name was not used on its own after 2008. In 2021 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sold its trade publishing division to HarperCollins for $349 million.