Simon & Schuster

Simon & Schuster was founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon, a piano salesman, and M. Lincoln Schuster, an editor at an automotive trade magazine. Their first title, The Cross Word Puzzle Book, appeared in April 1924 under the Plaza Publishing imprint and became an immediate bestseller. The company quickly moved beyond puzzles, publishing Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

Over a century the house built an extraordinary list. Publishers Weekly notes 61 Pulitzer Prize winners, 18 National Book Award winners, 18 Newbery winners, and 15 Caldecott winners among its titles. In 1939 it backed the launch of Pocket Books, America's first mass-market paperback publisher, and in 1942 it co-launched the Little Golden Books series with Western Publishing. In 1993 it acquired Macmillan Publishing, bringing Scribner and Free Press into the S&S fold. Today the company publishes roughly 2,000 titles a year under about 35 imprints, spanning literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, science, history, children's books, and speculative fiction.

Walter Isaacson's The Innovators, published by Simon & Schuster in 2014, traces the digital revolution from Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing through Tim Berners-Lee and the web. It sits alongside other signature S&S titles in the list, from Fredrik Backman's novels to Bob Woodward's political reporting.

Since October 2023, Simon & Schuster has been owned by the private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, following the collapse of a blocked acquisition by Penguin Random House. CEO Jonathan Karp has described the company as returning to its roots as an independent trade publisher, with the founders' original aim of producing books that are commercial, successful, and culture-defining still guiding the editorial agenda.