Publisher profile
Holt, Rinehart and Winston was a New York publisher formed in 1960 by merging Henry Holt, Rinehart & Company and John C. Winston. It issued textbooks and general books, including Rinehart Editions paperbacks. Its name survives on textbooks from Holt McDougal.
Holt, Rinehart and Winston took shape in March 1960, when three houses merged: Henry Holt and Company of New York, which dated back to 1866 as Leypoldt and Holt; Rinehart & Company, also of New York; and the John C. Winston Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1884. Holt was the surviving legal entity, now with a longer name. In 1967 CBS bought the combined firm.
The break came in 1985. The general-interest side and the Henry Holt name went to the German group Holtzbrinck, and that business is the Henry Holt and Company of today, a separate publisher. The textbook side kept the Holt, Rinehart and Winston name and passed to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. When Houghton Mifflin took over Harcourt's education business around 2008, the imprint was folded together with McDougal Littell as Holt McDougal, a school-textbook division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
For a quarter century, though, the name sat on both kinds of list. There were school and college texts, and there was a trade list with some surprises. Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Robert Heinlein's Friday both appeared under the Holt, Rinehart and Winston name. So did a paperback line called Rinehart Editions, where Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf appeared in 1963 as volume 122.
That Steppenwolf is the book that brings most readers here. The translation is Basil Creighton's, first issued in English by Henry Holt in 1929, and the 1963 edition adds an introduction by Joseph Mileck. A version of the translation updated by Mileck circulates in later paperbacks, among them a 1990 printing under the Henry Holt name. Check the title page of your copy and you will see which stage of the story you are holding.
What can a reader expect? A Holt, Rinehart and Winston line on the copyright page usually points to a printing from 1960 to the mid-1980s, or to a later reissue of one. Some of those editions carry scholarly apparatus, as the Mileck introduction does for Steppenwolf. Books from the present-day Henry Holt come from a different company, so the two names are worth keeping apart.
Subjects: Literary Fiction
Authors: Hermann Hesse
Literary Fiction
by Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf follows Harry Haller, a middle-aged writer who sees himself as half refined intellectual and half solitary wolf, and who is close to deciding to end his life.
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