Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1950 and located in New York, now an

imprint Imprint or imprinting may refer to: Entertainment * ''Imprint'' (TV series), Canadian television series * "Imprint" (''Masters of Horror''), episode of TV show ''Masters of Horror'' * ''Imprint'' (film), a 2007 independent drama/thriller film ...

Hachette Book Group Hachette Book Group (HBG) is a publishing company owned by Hachette Livre, the largest publishing company in France, and the third largest trade and educational publisher in the world. Hachette Livre is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lagardère Gr ...

. It publishes books in the fields of

psychology Psychology is the science, scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immens ...

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. ...

economics Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics anal ...

science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...

politics Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies ...

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...

, current affairs, and

history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...

History

Basic Books originated as a small

Greenwich Village Greenwich Village ( , , ) is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village ...

-based book club marketed to psychoanalysts. Arthur Rosenthal took over the book club in 1950, and under his ownership it soon began producing original books, mostly in the behavioral sciences. Early successes included Ernest Jones's ''The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud'', as well as works by

Claude Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss (, ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthr ...

, Jean Piaget and

Erik Erikson Erik Homburger Erikson (born Erik Salomonsen; 15 June 1902 – 12 May 1994) was a German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychological development of human beings. He coined the phrase identity ...

Irving Kristol Irving Kristol (; January 22, 1920 – September 18, 2009) was an American journalist who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism". As a founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectua ...

joined Basic Books in 1960, and helped Basic to expand into the social sciences. Harper & Row purchased the company in 1969. In 1997,

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News C ...

announced that it would merge Basic Books into its trade publishing program, effectively closing the imprint and ending its publishing of serious academic books. That same year, Basic was purchased by the newly created

Perseus Books Group Perseus Books Group was an American publishing company founded in 1996 by investor Frank Pearl. Perseus acquired the trade publishing division of Addison-Wesley (including the Merloyd Lawrence imprint) in 1997. It was named Publisher of the Ye ...

. Perseus's publishing business was acquired by

in 2016. In 2018, Seal Press became an imprint of Basic.

Authors

Basic's list of authors includes: * Stephon Alexander * Edward E. Baptist *

H.W. Brands Henry William Brands Jr. (born August 7, 1953) is an American historian. He holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his PhD in history in 1985. He has authored 30 books on U.S. histor ...

* Zbigniew Brzezinski *

Iris Chang Iris Shun-Ru Chang (March 28, 1968November 9, 2004) was a Chinese American journalist, author of historical books and political activist. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, '' The Rape of Nanking'', and ...

* Stephanie Coontz *

Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. An ...

* Andrea Dworkin * Michael Eric Dyson * Niall Ferguson * Richard Feynman * Richard Florida * Martin Ford * Howard Gardner *

Jonathan Haidt Jonathan David Haidt (; born October 19, 1963) is an American social psychologist and author. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business. His main areas of study are the psychology of ...

* Victor Davis Hanson * Judith L. Herman * Christopher Hitchens * Douglas Hofstadter * Leszek Kolakowski *

Kevin M. Kruse Kevin Michael Kruse (born 1972) is an American historian and a professor of history at Princeton University. His research interests include the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America, with a particular focus on the ...

* Lawrence Lessig *

Robert Nozick Robert Nozick (; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University,

* Steven Pinker * Samantha Power * Eugene Rogan *

Lee Smolin Lee Smolin (; born June 6, 1955) is an American theoretical physicist, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the ...

* Jacob Soll * Jason Sokol * Timothy Snyder *

Tamler Sommers Tamler Sommers is an American philosopher and writer. He is the son of the American philosopher Fred Sommers and the stepson of Christina Hoff Sommers. Sommers specializes in ethics and free will, and has commented on the ethics of the Alex Rodrig ...

* Thomas Sowell * Ian Stewart * Beverly Daniel Tatum * Sherry Turkle * Eric Topol *

Michael Walzer Michael Laban Walzer (born 1935) is an American political theorist and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor emeritus of '' Dissent'', an intellectual magazin ...

Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth Ann Warren ( née Herring; born June 22, 1949) is an American politician and former law professor who is the senior United States senator from Massachusetts, serving since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party and regarded as ...

* George Weigel * Steven Weinberg * Frank Wilczek * Bee Wilson * Richard Wrangham *

Irvin D. Yalom Irvin David Yalom (; born June 13, 1931) is an American existential psychiatrist who is emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, as well as author of both fiction and nonfiction. Early life Yalom was born in Washington, D.C. ...

References

External links

Basic Books websitePerseus Group websiteSamuel G. Freedman on the formation of Perseus Books
{{authority control Book publishing companies based in New York (state) Publishing companies established in 1950 American companies established in 1950 1950 establishments in New York City