Viking Press

Official websitepenguin.com/vikingbooks

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^[1] and then acquired by the Penguin Group in 1975.^[2][3]

Imprints

• Viking Kestrel
• Viking Adult, who got in legal trouble in 1946 due to John Steinbeck's bold eulogy, and fell out of public favor in 1947^{[clarification needed]}
• Viking children's Books
• Viking Portable Library
• Pamela Dorman Books

Viking Children's

In 1933, Viking Press founded a department called Junior Books to publish children's books. The first book published was The Story About Ping in 1933 under editor May Massee. Junior Books was later renamed Viking Children's Books. Viking Kestrel was one of its imprints.

Its books have won the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, and include such books as The Twenty-One Balloons, written and illustrated by William Pene du Bois (1947, Newbery medal winner for 1948), Corduroy, Make Way for Ducklings, The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (1993), The Outsiders, Pippi Longstocking, and The Story of Ferdinand. Its paperbacks are now published by Puffin Books, which includes the Speak and Firebird imprints. In 2023, Tamar Brazis was named v-p and publisher of Viking Children's Books.^[4]

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 '70s and late '90s, has been dormant since 1998, with no new titles released since then. However, a number of existing titles remain in print.

Titles

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

Notable editors

• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, consulting editor
• Wendy Wolf, vice president and associate editor, 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.

External links

• 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)