Scribner is the name of an American book publishing company. It was named for a family of book publishers in New York City, New York. Scribner helped make many authors famous, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Wolfe.
Scribner originally was a publisher of religious books. Charles Scribner and Isaac D. Baker founded the company as Baker & Scribner in a church in 1846. Soon after, the company published its first copyrighted book, The Puritans and Their Principles by Edwin Hall. After Baker’s death in 1950, the company was renamed Charles Scribner & Co. In addition to books, by 1870, Scribner had begun publishing literary works, including the illustrated magazine Scribner’s Monthly and later its successor Scribner’s Magazine. The magazines attracted talented young writers, and many of them became well-known authors.
Charles Scribner died in 1871 and his sons ran the publishing house, which was reorganized as Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1878. Charles Scribner II and his son, Charles Scribner III, were the second and third family members to head the publishing firm. Both were born in New York City. Charles II was born on Oct. 18, 1854, and died on April 19, 1930. Charles III was born on Jan. 26, 1890, and died suddenly on Feb. 11, 1952. His son, Charles Scribner Jr. (also known as Charles Scribner IV), succeeded him and oversaw the family publishing business until 1984. Charles Jr. was the personal editor and publisher for Ernest Hemingway toward the end of Hemingway’s career. Charles Jr. wrote a memoir, In the Company of Writers: A Life in Publishing (1991), and a collection of his writings, In the Web of Ideas: The Education of a Publisher (1993). He died on Nov. 11, 1995.
After several acquisitions and mergers in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Charles Scribner’s Sons shortened its name to Scribner. Today, the company has become identified with some of the greatest writers in American literature, including Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Kurt Vonnegut, and Edith Wharton, in addition to Hemingway, Stevenson, and Wolfe. Other notable Scribner authors include Don DeLillo, Anthony Doerr, Stephen King, Frank McCourt, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Annie Proulx, and Jeannette Walls. Scribner’s authors have been recipients of such prestigious awards as the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
