Simon & Schuster 100 notable books!
Simon & Schuster turns 100 this year! To celebrate this world-leading book publisher has shared a list of 100 notable books from its long publishing history.
This list is a blend of bestsellers, prize winners, headline makers and cultural sensations.
“A group of Simon & Schuster staffers took on the daunting challenge of selecting 100 titles from our history that are believed to best represent the breadth and depth of the company’s publishing program, across imprints,” the publisher announced Wednesday.
The list beginning in 1924 includes:
- The Cross Word Puzzle Book by F. Gregory Hartswick, Prosper Buranelli, and Margaret Petherbridge. The book came with an attached pencil, is considered the first publication of its kind.
- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s 1974 bestseller All the President’s Men, which helped establish the publisher’s eminence in political nonfiction.
- Joseph Heller’s anti-war classic Catch-22.
- Prize-winning history such as David Blight’s Frederick Douglass and Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters
- Literary fiction including Don DeLillo’s Underworld
- Commercial fiction likes of Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are the Children?
- Benjamin Spock’s revolutionary The Common Sense Baby and Childcare Book
- Children’s favourite Eloise by Kay Thompson and illustrator Hilary Knight
“We wanted to convey the influence that these books had on culture over the past century, and the sweep of what we published,” says Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp.
No authors were included twice and books no longer available through Simon & Schuster were left off, such as a major release from the publisher in the 1950s: Sloan Wilson’s novel about a World War II veteran’s struggles back home, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
From 1924-1976, all of the authors listed are white, a reflection of what Karp calls “the tenor of the times.”
Few writers of colour had mainstream success during that era. Those who did, published their most notable works elsewhere. Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou published with Random House, Richard Wright with Harper (now HarperCollins), James Baldwin with Dial Press, Alex Haley with Doubleday, Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison with Knopf.
People of colour gained more representation at Simon & Schuster from 1977-2000
- starting with Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, before the list broadly diversifies in the 21st century.
- Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty
- Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana
- Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies
- Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
- Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down
- The final entry, a book from 2023, Safiya Sinclair’s acclaimed memoir How to Say Babylon
“I have distinct memories of being in the room when some of these books were being presented and feeling the energy they generated,” says committee member Wendy Sherwin, Simon & Schuster’s vice president for independent retail sales. “How to Say Babylon had that kind of energy and felt like a book that people will keep on reading.”
About Simon & Schuster
Like many leading publishers, Simon & Schuster began as an independently owned company and vastly expanded after the 1960s. Simon & Schuster’s founders had both died by the end of the ’60s, and the company changed ownership several times before being purchased last year by the private equity firm KKR.
Along the way, Simon & Schuster acquired numerous other publishers, whose books are now part of the S&S catalogue and its centennial list. Several older selections, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country were published by Scribner, which Simon & Schuster acquired in 1994. Other works first released elsewhere include Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and B.F. Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior.
The list of 100 not only showcases the different kinds of books that get published, but the different ways they caught on.
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