The Woman in White

One of the earliest works of detective fiction, this story caused a sensation with readers at the time. More

Middlemarch

Ranked number one in a 2015 BBC poll of the 100 greatest British novels. More

J. B. Lippincott

Born in 1813 in New Jersey, Joshua Ballinger Lippincott became a bookseller shortly after he moved to Philadelphia at age 14. More

Profiles in Courage

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

Gabriel García Márquez

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

A Bear Called Paddington

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

Herman Melville and Moby-Dick

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

Little Bear

The very first I Can Read! book has sold more than one million copies. More

To Kill a Mockingbird

Much-loved Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, voted by librarians across America as the best novel of the twentieth century. More

Letter from Agatha Christie

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 Odyssey of Homer

Hailed as “the best translation there is of a great, perhaps the greatest, poet” (New York Times Book Review). More

J.R.R. Tolkien and the Trilogy

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

Mark Twain

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