Henry Holt and Company is an American book-publishing company based in
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
. One of the oldest publishers in the United States, it was founded in 1866 by
Henry Holt and
Frederick Leypoldt
Frederick Leypoldt (born Jakob Friedrich Ferdinand Leupold; 17 November 1835 – 31 March 1884) was a German-American bibliographer, the founder of ''Library Journal'', ''Publishers Weekly'', ''Index Medicus'' and other publications.
Early life ...
. The company publishes in the fields of American and international
fiction
Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying character (arts), individuals, events, or setting (narrative), places that are imagination, imaginary or in ways that are imaginary. Fictional portrayals are thus inconsistent ...
,
biography
A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or curri ...
,
history
History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the Human history, human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some t ...
,
politics
Politics () is the set of activities that are associated with decision-making, making decisions in social group, groups, or other forms of power (social and political), power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of Social sta ...
,
science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
,
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...
,
health
Health has a variety of definitions, which have been used for different purposes over time. In general, it refers to physical and emotional well-being, especially that associated with normal functioning of the human body, absent of disease, p ...
, and
children's literature
Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. In addition to conventional literary genres, modern children's literature is classified by the intended age of the reade ...
. In the U.S., it operates under
Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers (occasionally known as the Macmillan Group; formally Macmillan Publishers Ltd in the United Kingdom and Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC in the United States) is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be on ...
.
History

The company publishes under several imprints, including Metropolitan Books,
Times Books
Times Books (previously the New York Times Book Company) is a publishing imprint owned by the New York Times Company and licensed to Henry Holt and Company.
Times Books began as the New York Times Book Company in 1969, when The New York Times Co ...
, Owl Books, and
Picador
A ''picador'' (; pl. ''picadores'') is one of the pair of horse-mounted bullfighters in a Spanish-style bullfight that jab the bull with a lance. They perform in the ''tercio de varas'', which is the first of the three stages in a stylized bull ...
. It also publishes under the name of Holt Paperbacks.
The company has published works by renowned authors
Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm (; ; March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and set ...
,
Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include '' The New York Trilogy'' (1987), '' Moon Palace'' (1989), '' The Music of Chance'' (1990), ' ...
,
Hilary Mantel
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel ( ; born Thompson; 6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Her first published novel, ''Every Day Is Mother's Day'', was releas ...
,
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost (March26, 1874January29, 1963) was an American poet. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American Colloquialism, colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New E ...
,
Hermann Hesse
Hermann Karl Hesse (; 2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a Germans, German-Swiss people, Swiss poet and novelist, and the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His interest in Eastern philosophy, Eastern religious, spiritual, and philosophic ...
,
Norman Mailer
Nachem Malech Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007), known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American writer, journalist and filmmaker. In a career spanning more than six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least ...
,
Herta Müller
Herta Müller (; born 17 August 1953) is a Romanian-German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in Nițchidorf (; ), Timiș County in Romania; her native languages are German and Romanian. Si ...
,
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. ( , ; born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, Literary genre, genres and Theme (narrative), th ...
,
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson; 13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as ''Treasure Island'', ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll ...
,
Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev ( ; rus, links=no, Иван Сергеевич ТургеневIn Turgenev's day, his name was written ., p=ɪˈvan sʲɪrˈɡʲe(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ tʊrˈɡʲenʲɪf; – ) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poe ...
, and
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...
.
From 1951 to 1985, Holt published the magazine ''
Field & Stream
''Field & Stream'' (''F&S'' for short) is an American magazine focusing on sport hunting, recreational fishing and other outdoor activities. It was a print publication between 1895 and 2015, and became an online-only publication in 2020. After ...
''.
Holt merged with
Rinehart & Company
Rinehart & Company was an American publishing company founded in 1946. Renamed Rinehart & Company in 1946, the publishing company merged with Henry Holt and Company and the John C. Winston Company in 1960, to form Holt, Rinehart and Winston (HRW). ...
of New York and the
John C. Winston Company of Philadelphia in 1960 to become
Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Holt McDougal is an American publishing company, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, that specializes in textbooks for use in high schools.
The Holt name is derived from that of U.S. publisher Henry Holt (1840–1926), co-founder of ...
. ''The Wall Street Journal'' reported on March 1 that Holt stockholders had approved the merger, last of the three approvals. "Henry Holt is the surviving concern, but will be known as Holt, Rinehart, Winston, Inc."
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS (an abbreviation of its original name, Columbia Broadcasting System), is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainme ...
purchased the company in 1967, but in 1985, the group split, and the retail publishing arm, along with the Holt name, was sold to the
Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group () is a privately held German company headquartered in Stuttgart, that owns publishing companies worldwide. Through Macmillan Publishers, it is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies.
In 2015, it ...
based in
Stuttgart
Stuttgart (; ; Swabian German, Swabian: ; Alemannic German, Alemannic: ; Italian language, Italian: ; ) is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Baden-Württemberg by population, largest city of the States of Germany, German state of ...
, which has retained Holt as a subsidiary publishing under its original name and in the US it is part of
Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers (occasionally known as the Macmillan Group; formally Macmillan Publishers Ltd in the United Kingdom and Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC in the United States) is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be on ...
.
The educational publishing arm, which retained the Holt, Rinehart and Winston name, was sold to
Harcourt.
Book series
* Amateur Studies
* American Science Series
* The American Presidents Series
* English Readings
* Holt Spoken Language Series
* Leisure Hour Series
The Leisure Hour Series (Henry Holt and Company) - Book Series List
publishinghistory.com. Retrieved 20 February 2019.
* Leisure Moment Series
* Library of Foreign Poetry
* The Makers of the Nineteenth Century (General editor: Basil Williams)
See also
*Holt McDougal
Holt McDougal is an American publishing company, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, that specializes in textbooks for use in high schools.
The Holt name is derived from that of U.S. publisher Henry Holt (1840–1926), co-founder of the ...
*Books in the United States
As of 2018, several firms in the United States rank among the world's biggest publishers of books in terms of revenue: Cengage Learning, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill Education, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, and Wiley.
...
References
External links
*
Henry Holt and Company
at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is a database of bibliographic information on genres considered speculative fiction, including science fiction and related genres such as fantasy, alternate history, and horror fiction. The ISFDB ...
*
{{Authority control
1866 establishments in New York (state)
Academic publishing companies
Book publishing companies based in New York (state)
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group
Publishing companies based in New York City
Publishing companies established in 1866