Reynal & Hitchcock

About Reynal & Hitchcock

Reynal & Hitchcock was a New York publishing house founded in 1933 by Eugene Reynal and Curtice Hitchcock, famous as the first publisher of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince in 1943.

Reynal had earlier founded the reprint house Blue Ribbon Books, and Hitchcock had worked at Macmillan and the Century Company before the two set up in partnership. The firm published the American edition of P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins in 1934, the London edition having appeared from Gerald Howe the same year. Its list also included Harold L. Ickes's The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon (1943) and Lillian Smith's bestselling first novel Strange Fruit (1944).

The Little Prince came about partly through Elizabeth Reynal, Eugene's French wife, who encouraged Saint-Exupéry to write a children's story while he was living in the United States. Reynal & Hitchcock issued it in April 1943 in separate English and French editions; Gallimard published it in France only after the liberation. The firm also ran Triangle Books, a line of inexpensive hardback reprints, until selling it to Doubleday in 1939.

Curtice Hitchcock died in May 1946, and the firm was absorbed into Harcourt, Brace in 1948.