Little, Brown and Company

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Little, Brown and Company is a publishing house established by Charles Coffin Little and his partner, James Brown. The company traces its history back to a bookstore founded by Ebenezer Battelle in 1784, Marlborough Street, Boston. Little and Brown, partners in the bookstore and former clerks, founded their company in 1837 (as Charles C. Little and James Brown), and were joined a year later by Augustus Flagg, who took over as managing partner after the death of Little in 1869 (James Brown had died in 1855). In 1847 the firm's name was changed to Little, Brown and Company.

The firm initially specialized in legal treatises and imported titles. Even so, in the early years Little and Brown published William H. Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, Jones Very's first book of poetry (edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson}, Letters of John Adams and works by James Russell Lowell and Francis Parkman. In 1853 Little, Brown began publishing the works of British poets from Chaucer to Wordsworth. There were ninety-six volumes published in the series in five years.

In 1859 John Bartlett became a partner in the firm. He held the rights to his Familiar Quotations, and Little, Brown published the 15th edition of the work in 1980, 125 years after its first publication.

John Murray Brown, James Brown's son, took over when Augustus Flagg retired in 1884. In the 1890s Little, Brown expanded into general publishing, including fiction. In 1896 it published Quo Vadis. In 1898 Little, Brown purchased a list of titles from the Roberts Brothers firm. This brought Edward Everett Hale, Helen Hunt Jackson and Louisa May Alcott into association with the firm.

John Murray Brown died in 1908 and James W. McIntyre became managing partner. When McIntyre died in 1913, Little, Brown incorporated. In 1925 Little, Brown entered into an agreement to publish all Atlantic Monthly books. This arrangement lasted until 1985. During this time the joint Atlantic Monthly Press/Little Brown imprint published James Truslow Adams's The Adams Family, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall's Mutiny on the "Bounty" trilogy, James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Walter D. Edmonds's Drums Along the Mohawk.

Other prominent authors published by Little, Brown in the 20th century have included Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), A. J. Cronin, C. S. Forester, Evelyn Waugh, John P. Marquand, Ogden Nash, Oliver Wendell Holmes, P. G. Wodehouse, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Bruce Catton, Edwin O'Connor, Catherine Drinker Bowen, J. Frank Dobie, John Fowles, Lillian Hellman, Herman Wouk, Henry Kissinger, Donald Barthelme, Hortense Calisher, Peter De Vries, Gore Vidal, William Manchester and William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson. They also published the photography of Ansel Adams.

The imprint was purchased by Time Inc. in 1968, and was made part of the Time Warner Book Group when Time merged with Warner Communications to form Time Warner in 1989. In 2006, the Time Warner Book Group was sold to French publisher Hachette Livre, and the imprint is now used by Hachette Livre's U.S. publishing company, Hachette Book Group USA.

In May 2006, the publishing company received some bad publicity over the plagiarism allegations levied towards Kaavya Viswanathan regarding her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. The negative press was short lived as allegations focused squarely on Viswanathan however.

Having been purchased by the French media concern Lagardere in March of 2006 the company was re-branded as Hachette Book Group USA (HBG). HBG has since focused on expanding and streamlining its publishing processes while refining their advanced distribution business. The distribution business provides fully scalable order-to-cash solutions to a number of publishers by way of a sophisticated warehousing infrastructure in Indiana and operations center in Boston.

[edit] References

Oliver, Bill (1986) Little, Brown and Company, in Peter Dzwonkonski, Ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography - Volume Forty-nine - American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638 - 1899 Part 1: A-M. Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company. ISBN 0-8103-1727-3