Penguin Young Readers Group

About Penguin Young Readers Group

Penguin Young Readers Group is the American children's and young adult publishing division of Penguin, now part of Penguin Random House, bringing together long-established imprints such as Dial, Puffin, Putnam, Philomel, Viking, Grosset & Dunlap and Frederick Warne.

The group was assembled over several decades of acquisitions rather than founded in a single year. Dial, which began as a book publisher in 1924, joined the group in the late 1960s according to Penguin's own history. The Putnam Berkley Group bought Philomel Books in 1980 and Grosset & Dunlap in 1982, the latter bringing the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Bobbsey Twins series. Penguin acquired Frederick Warne, the Beatrix Potter publisher, in 1983, and Putnam Berkley added Price Stern Sloan, home of Mad Libs, in 1993. Newer imprints followed, including the teen paperback line Speak, launched by Puffin in 2002, and the science fiction and fantasy imprint Firebird, also in 2002, and Razorbill, founded by Ben Schrank in 2006.

Books from its imprints include S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (Viking, 1967), Richard Peck's Newbery Medal winner A Year Down Yonder (Dial) and John Green's The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton Juvenile, 2012).

Since the Penguin and Random House merger was completed on 1 July 2013 the group has sat within Penguin Random House, which Bertelsmann has owned outright since buying Pearson's remaining stake, a sale completed in 2020.