Tag: Mid 1900s

Ursula Nordstrom

Ursula Nordstrom.
When Anne Carroll Moore, the powerful and opinionated superintendent of children’s work at the New York Public Library, asked Harper & Brothers editor Ursula Nordstrom why she felt qualified to produce children’s books, Nordstrom said only this: “Well, I am a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing.” More

Stuart Little

Stuart Little
White’s beloved classic about a small mouse on a big adventure is a perennial bestseller. More

To Kill a Mockingbird

A New York Times advertisement announcing the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which ran on July 17, 1960.
When J. B. Lippincott (later acquired by HarperCollins) editor Therese (Tay) von Hohoff saw the first draft of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), she saw a promising story, but one in need of some reshaping and editing. More

Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago
Collins was the first to publish this epic romantic drama by the Nobel Prize winner in English. More

Caps for Sale

Caps for Sale
Longtime classic about a peddler and a band of mischievous monkeys. More

Original contract for Thorn-Apple Tree

Original contract for Thorn-Apple Tree
Grace Campbell’s debut novel, Thorn-Apple Tree, was one of the earliest works of fiction written by a Canadian to be published by William Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd. More

Native Son

Native Son
Wright’s unsparing reflection on what it means to be black in America. More

Eugene Exman and Martin Luther King

Strength to Love by Martin Luther King Jr.
Shortly after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and ‘56, Harper & Brothers religious books editor Eugene Exman left New York City for Alabama and secured a meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. More

The Look of Stuart Little

Stuart Little by E. B. White (1945).
In early 1945, Ursula Nordstrom, head of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls was awaiting completion of E. B. White’s manuscript for a children’s story about a talking mouse, titled Stuart Little. More

Old Yeller

Old Yeller
Instantly acclaimed, it has become one of the most beloved children’s classics ever written. More

Social Change: Civil Rights

A page from the Fall 1937 Harper & Brothers catalog touting This Is My Story by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Beginning with This Is My Story (1937), Harper & Brothers published many works by Eleanor Roosevelt that promoted civil rights and the need for government action, including This I Remember (1949), On My Own (1958), and Tomorrow Is Now (1963). More

The New International Version of the Bible

The Committee on Bible Translation scholars.
The efforts of one man in the mid-1950s brought about the publication of the New International Version of the Bible, a contemporary English translation that provided an accurate and understandable alternative to the King James Version, which had been the dominant translation for centuries. More

Sounder

Sounder
Newbery Award–winning book that became an influential children’s work on race and class. More

Our Town

Our Town
Pulitzer Prize–winning drama; hailed by Edward Albee as “The finest play ever written by an American.” More

The Odyssey of Homer

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