Doubleday

Doubleday began in 1897 when Frank Nelson Doubleday partnered with magazine publisher Samuel McClure to form the Doubleday & McClure Company. Their early list was remarkably varied: Rudyard Kipling's The Day's Work, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, Helen Keller's The Story of My Life, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle all appeared within the first couple of years. The partnership dissolved in 1900, and Doubleday formed Doubleday, Page & Company. A 1927 merger with the George H. Doran Company created Doubleday, Doran, then the largest publishing house in the English-speaking world. By 1947 the firm was the largest book publisher in the United States. After a sale to Bertelsmann in 1986 and a period under Random House, Doubleday merged with the Knopf Publishing Group in 2009 to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, now part of Penguin Random House.

The list today spans commercial fiction, literary fiction, and serious nonfiction. Authors on the roster include Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, Percival Everett, David Grann, Hua Hsu, Patrick Radden Keefe, Robert Kolker, Colson Whitehead, and Hanya Yanagihara. The parent group also counts Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Alice Munro among its authors.

For a reader who landed here through one of its titles, the WebToTell shelf gives a useful cross-section. Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad sit alongside David Grann's The Lost City of Z and The Wager, Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing, Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road, and Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The range is wide, but the common thread is a publisher that has, for over a century, put both ambitious literary work and narrative nonfiction under the same dolphin-and-anchor mark.

What a reader can expect is editorial attention to craft and momentum, whether the subject is a lost city, a wartime voyage, or a multigenerational family story. The list has carried everything from Dan Brown's thrillers to Yaa Gyasi's novels, so genre boundaries are loose by design.