Norton

About Norton

Norton, in full W. W. Norton & Company, is an independent New York publisher founded in 1923 by William Warder Norton and his wife Mary Dows Herter (Polly) Norton. It publishes general non-fiction, fiction, poetry and college textbooks, and it is owned by its employees.

The Nortons began by printing lectures given at the People's Institute, the adult education arm of Cooper Union, and incorporated the venture as the People's Institute Publishing Company on 7 November 1923. As the list widened into philosophy, music and psychology it was reincorporated as W. W. Norton & Company on 7 May 1926; Norton became Sigmund Freud's main American publisher. It moved seriously into college publishing in 1930. Warder Norton died in 1945, and under an arrangement begun in 1952 Polly handed ownership to the firm's active staff on condition that it stay independent; it has been wholly employee-owned since the early 1960s.

M. H. Abrams shaped the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the first of the Norton Anthologies that became standard college texts. Norton's trade list has included Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, the American edition of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Bugliosi and Gentry's Helter Skelter, Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker and Chuck Palahniuk's first novel, Fight Club (1996). It bought Liveright in 1974, set up Norton Professional Books in 1984 and bought Countryman Press in 1996; Norton Young Readers is its children's list. In the early 1990s it set up W. W. Norton & Company Ltd in London to sell its books in Britain.