Our Company

“Books are the weapons in the battle of ideas.” These were the words of William Warder Norton, who 90 years ago launched the firm that bears his name. Today, the three-person company he once ran from his living room has become the oldest and largest publishing house owned entirely by its employees. photo of Mr. and Mrs. Norton Mr. and Mrs. Norton In 1923, Norton and his wife, Mary Dows Herter Norton, hired a stenographer and began transcribing and publishing the lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the adult division of Cooper Union in New York City. While initially modest in scope, this enterprise embodied Norton’s progressive vision that leaders in their fields—not mere popularizers—should “bring to the public the knowledge of our time.” Norton and his wife used their living room table to assemble these lectures into pamphlets, which they then boxed in sets of twenty to sell as a whole. As Mrs. Norton later remembered, “Warder would carry the results by taxi in an old Drew suitcase that had accompanied my parents on their wedding journey.” The Nortons soon expanded their program beyond the People’s Institute, acquiring manuscripts by celebrated academics from America and abroad and entering the fields of philosophy, music, and psychology, in which they published acclaimed works by Bertrand Russell, Paul Henry Lang, and Sigmund Freud (as his primary American publisher). Described in the New York Herald Tribune as “a figure of universal respect and liking,” Warder Norton was inspired by his sense of duty to serve as the president of the Council on Books in Wartime during World War II, working with other publishing greats including Bennett Cerf and John Farrar to spearhead a book donation effort that put 123 million copies of 1,180 titles into the hands of those in military service. “This is the most valuable thing that bookmen can undertake in the conduct of the war,” said Norton about the massive project that produced books designed to fit into the pockets of soldiers; in this role, he also coined his phrase about books as weapons, which was adopted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. William Warder Norton died shortly after the war. Within a few years, Mrs. Norton, who had been so instrumental in the firm’s development, decided that the company should be entrusted to the next generation of employees, and she offered most of her stock to its leading editors and managers. The Joint Stockholders Agreement that was subsequently signed gave the ownership of the firm to its active employees; that agreement remains in force to this day, the number of shareholders greatly expanded to include nearly all current Norton employees. As George P. Brockway, the company’s third president, said, “We have remained independent mainly because Warder Norton was a fiercely independent man and surrounded himself with others of like mind.” "Let us make all the necessary vows that we will stick to the business of publishing the best books we can lay our hands on and then keep our hands on them for as long as may be.” —William Warder Norton Since those early days, W. W. Norton & Company has consistently published books that reflect their social moment and resonate well beyond it. Some of the era-defining books published by Norton include The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary and is considered one of the most influential books of the twentieth century; A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, which had its redemptive ending famously cut by its editor to make the novel darker yet; Thirteen Days, Robert F. Kennedy’s firsthand account of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Present at the Creation, by Dean Acheson, who was praised by Gaddis Smith of Yale University as the most effective secretary of state of his era and a writer with “no equal since Thomas Jefferson first occupied the office in the eighteenth century”; Liar’s Poker, which launched Michael Lewis’s decades-long chronicle of Wall Street’s greed and hubris; and The 9/11 Commission Report, a vital historical document printed with record speed, a significant portion of its profits going to charity. William Warder Norton’s aim was to publish “any book that could bring to the public the knowledge of our time.” The company holds fast to this mission and continues to print the work of some of the world’s most influential voices. Nobel Prize winners include Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Eric Kandel, Paul Krugman, Edmund Phelps, Joseph Stiglitz, and Harold Varmus; Pulitzer Prize winners include Dean Acheson, Jared Diamond, Rita Dove, John Dower, Stephen Dunn, Erik Erikson, Eric Foner, Annette Gordon-Reed, Stephen Greenblatt, Maxine Kumin, Joseph Lash, William McFeely, John Matteson, Edmund Morgan, and William Taubman. Norton’s thriving poetry program, established in the 1960s, also includes National Book Award winners Ai, A. R. Ammons, Stanley Kunitz, Adrienne Rich, and Gerald Stern.