This 1963 marketing and publicity brochure for Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White includes a letter from White explaining how he got the idea for the story. More
Harper & Brothers helped groom the image of a future president when it agreed in the mid-1950s to work with a young senator on a collection of biographical sketches about courageous American lawmakers. More
J. B. Lippincott publishes the Pulitzer Prize–winning To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, one of the most influential books on race in America, which goes on to sell more than 40 million copies. More
Gabriel García Márquez drew on his childhood experiences in Colombia when crafting the story of the fictional Buendía family in the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. More
John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is published and becomes one of the bestselling nonfiction books of the 1990s, launching an era of gender and relationship dialogue. More
In 1958, an editor at Collins named Barbara Ker Wilson received a manuscript submission about a talking bear, which she opened with “initial suspicion” —as the publisher had received many other proposals featuring humanized animals that “are invariably either whimsy-whamsy, written down, or filled with adult innuendoes.” More
Harper & Brothers turned down Herman Melville’s first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, and it was released to strong sales by another publisher. More
This letter from Agatha Christie (here signing with her second married name, Mallowan) shows the close relationship she had with Collins publisher Billy Collins. More
The I Can Read! series launches with the publication of Little Bear, written by Else Holmelund Minarik and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, and becomes the number one beginning reader series in the United States. More
Sir Stanley Unwin, chairman of British publishers George Allen & Unwin (later acquired by HarperCollins), originally rejected the 9,250-page manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, the sequel to J. R. R. Tolkien’s moderately successful (at the time) The Hobbit, as it was too long, and the author would make a deal with the publisher only if they also agreed to take another of his unfinished books. More
In 1866, with mostly newspaper articles and other short works to his name, Mark Twain accepted an assignment from the Sacramento Union to produce a weekly column from Hawaii. More