Norton

About Norton

Norton, in full W. W. Norton & Company, is an independent New York publisher founded in 1923 by William Warder Norton and Mary Dows Herter Norton, and owned by its employees since the mid-twentieth century.

The Nortons began by printing lectures given at the People's Institute, the adult education branch of Cooper Union, working from a room lent by the Institute at 70 Fifth Avenue. The business was incorporated as the People's Institute Publishing Company on 7 November 1923 and reincorporated as W. W. Norton & Company on 7 May 1926 as it moved into original books. It entered college publishing in 1930 and published Freud's New Introductory Lectures in 1933. After Warder Norton died in 1945, Polly Norton passed control to the firm's editors and staff on condition that it stay independent.

M. H. Abrams devised The Norton Anthology of English Literature in the 1960s, and the anthologies became staples of college teaching. Books on Norton's list include Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Helter Skelter, Liar's Poker, Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) and Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Norton bought Liveright in 1974 and Countryman Press in 1996, and founded Norton Professional Books in 1984; Norton Young Readers is its children's list.