Publisher profile
Independent, employee-owned American publisher founded in 1923. Publishes literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, college anthologies, and professional books across four imprints.
W. W. Norton & Company was founded in 1923 by William Warder Norton and his wife Mary Dows Herter Norton in New York City. In the early 1960s, Mary Norton transferred most of the company's stock to its senior editors and managers, making Norton one of the rare major publishers still wholly employee-owned. Julia A. Reidhead has held the presidency since 2017. The company puts out roughly 450 titles a year across four imprints: Liveright for literary fiction and 20th-century classics, Norton Professional Books for mental health, architecture, design, and education, Countryman Press for lifestyle and instructional titles, and Norton Young Readers for books aimed at preschoolers through young adults.
Norton is best known outside the trade world for its Norton Anthologies, particularly The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th edition as of 2018), and its Norton Critical Editions, which pair an annotated text with contextual documents and critical essays. Both series are staples of university literature courses.
The trade list is where readers most often encounter Norton. Brian Christian's The Alignment Problem, a tour through machine-learning research and the ethics of building AI, sits alongside Richard Powers' The Overstory and his later novel Playground. Jill Lepore's These Truths, Mary Beard's SPQR, and Joy Harjo's An American Sunrise show the range of long-form history and poetry Norton has championed.
The company's founding motto, "Books That Live," does a fair job of describing the editorial sensibility: Norton favors books meant to be kept, reread, and argued with rather than consumed and forgotten.
Subjects: Short Fiction & Anthologies, Technology, Ethics & Society, Historical Fiction, History & Society
Authors: ’Pemi Aguda, Brian Christian, Maaza Mengiste, Richard Powers
Short Fiction & Anthologies
by ’Pemi Aguda
Ghostroots is ’Pemi Aguda’s debut collection: twelve stories set in a Lagos where the supernatural presses against ordinary domestic and working life.
Technology, Ethics & Society
by Brian Christian
Machine-learning systems learn from examples, rewards, and human behavior—but none of these provides a simple or neutral expression of what people truly want.
Historical Fiction
by Maaza Mengiste
Set principally during Fascist Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King follows Hirut, a recently orphaned servant who is drawn from domestic subordination into armed resistance.
History & Society
by Richard Powers
The Overstory is a large-scale literary novel in which the lives of nine Americans become entangled with trees, forests, scientific discovery, and environmental resistance.
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