Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheimer and then acquired by the Penguin Group in 1975.

The publisher's name and logo, a Viking ship drawn by Rockwell Kent, were chosen as symbols of enterprise, adventure, and exploration in publishing.

Viking Press was sold to Penguin Books in 1975 for $12 million due to the publishing house's monetary difficulties. These were speculated to have been caused by the shrinkage in the juvenile market and Viking Press' lack of a textbook division.

Viking Critical Library

The Viking Critical Library offers academic editions of literary texts. Like W. W. Norton's Norton Critical Editions, all titles print the text alongside a selection of critical essays and contextual documents (including relevant extracts from the author's oeuvre). The series, which only saw sporadic publications in the late 1970s and late 1990s, has been dormant since 1998, with no new titles released since then. However, a number of existing titles remain in print.

;Titles

{| class="wikitable sortable"

|-

! Author !! Title !! Editor

!Year published!! Notes

|-

| Don DeLillo || White Noise || Mark Osteen

|1998|| .

|-

| Graham Greene || The Quiet American || John Clark Pratt

|1996||

|-

| James Joyce || Dubliners || Robert Scholes

|1996||

|-

| James Joyce || Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man || Chester G. Anderson

|1977|| The only title known to include explanatory end notes.

|-

| Ken Kesey || One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest || John Clark Pratt

|1977|| Out of print.

|-

| Jack Kerouac || On the Road || Scott Donaldson

|1979|| Out of print.

|-

| Arthur Miller || The Crucible || Gerald Weales

|1996||

|-

| Arthur Miller || Death of a Salesman || Gerald Weales

|1996||

|-

| John Steinbeck || The Grapes of Wrath || Kevin Hearle

|1997||

|}

Notable authors

  • Abdullah II, King of Jordan
  • Kingsley Amis
  • Sherwood Anderson
  • Hannah Arendt
  • Peter S. Beagle
  • Antony Beevor
  • Saul Bellow
  • Ludwig Bemelmans
  • Dan Blum
  • T. C. Boyle
  • Geraldine Brooks
  • Daniel James Brown
  • William S. Burroughs
  • Lan Cao
  • Rosanne Cash
  • Ferreira de Castro
  • J. M. Coetzee
  • Leonard Cohen
  • Roald Dahl
  • Theodore Draper
  • Lawrence Durrell
  • Kim Edwards
  • Daniel Ellsberg
  • Helen Fielding
  • Frederick Forsyth
  • Don Freeman
  • Tana French
  • Elizabeth George
  • Elizabeth Gilbert
  • Rumer Godden
  • Will Gompertz
  • Graham Greene
  • R. K. Narayan
  • Robert Greene
  • Martha Grimes
  • S. E. Hinton
  • David Irving
  • Kristopher Jansma
  • James Weldon Johnson
  • James Joyce
  • Jan Karon
  • Ezra Jack Keats
  • Garrison Keillor
  • William Kennedy
  • Jack Kerouac
  • Ken Kesey
  • Sue Monk Kidd
  • Stephen King
  • Jamil Jan Kochai
  • D. H. Lawrence
  • Tobsha Learner
  • Rebecca Makkai
  • Hilary Mantel
  • Peter Matthiessen
  • Robert McCloskey
  • Terry McMillan
  • Arthur Miller
  • Jojo Moyes
  • John Julius Norwich
  • Barack Obama
  • Michelle Obama
  • Richard Osman
  • Octavio Paz
  • Steven Pinker
  • Thomas Pynchon
  • Ruth Sawyer
  • Jon Scieszka
  • Kate Seredy
  • Katherine Binney Shippen
  • Upton Sinclair
  • Wallace Stegner
  • John Steinbeck
  • Rex Stout
  • August Strindberg
  • Simms Taback
  • Whitney Terrell
  • Barbara Tuchman
  • Carl Van Doren
  • William T. Vollmann
  • David Foster Wallace
  • Rosemary Wells
  • Rebecca West
  • Patrick White
  • Vikram Sampath

Notable editors

  • Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, consulting editor
  • Wendy Wolf, vice president and associate editor, as of 1994

Awards

  • 10 Newbery Medals
  • 10 Caldecott Medals
  • 27 Newbery Honors
  • 33 Caldecott Honors
  • 1 American Book Award
  • 2 Coretta Scott King Awards
  • 3 Batcheldor Honors
  • 5 Christopher Medals
  • 2 Margaret A. Edwards Awards for authors S. E. Hinton and Richard Peck

References

Further reading

  • Bean, Martha Sue. A History and Profile of the Viking Press, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Theses, 1969.
  • "Viking Press, Viking Penguin", Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 46, pp. 365-368.
  • Viking Press overview at Penguin
  • Viking Press history at Penguin (page from August 28, 2006 stored by the Internet Archive)
  • Viking Children's Books overview at Penguin
  • Viking Children's Books history at Penguin (page from April 26, 2008 stored by the Internet Archive)