Tag: Social change

1973: William Collins and Sons secures the rights to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago…

William Collins and Sons secures the rights to Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, an eye-opening work that exposes in startling detail the horrors of the communist regime in Russia. More

George Eliot

Mary Anne Evans, born in 1819, led a turbulent life that often broke with Victorian social norms. More

Social Change: Collins Gives Back

In the UK, William Collins II of Collins and Sons took up labor causes, especially child labor. More

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), a story about growing up poor in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, was originally an entry for a Harper & Brothers memoir contest. More

1863: Harper & Brothers takes a clear stand in favor of abolition

Harper & Brothers takes a clear stand in favor of abolition with the publication of Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. More

Sounder

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

1943: Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is published…

Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a story about growing up poor in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, shines a light on first- and second-generation Americans living in poverty. 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

The Publisher of presidents

HarperCollins is the publisher of many United States presidents–beginning with the very first one. More

Letter from John Donovan submitting the manuscript for I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.

In June 1968, author John Donovan wrote to Ursula Nordstrom, head of the U.S. Harper Children’s division, asking her to read the manuscript... More

Journey to Jo’burg

Groundbreaking book set in South Africa during the apartheid era and banned by its government. More

Lawrence Hill

Writing is the one pursuit I have always pursued, and always known I was compelled to pursue. More

Lawrence Hill

1862: Thomas Nast documents the Civil War and politics in Harper’s Weekly

Thomas Nast begins documenting the Civil War and politics through caricature in Harper’s Weekly. More

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

One of Harper & Brothers’ most famous and influential authors was Aldous Huxley, who signed with the publisher in 1927 and published his first book, Texts and Pretexts, with them in 1932. More

Amistad

HarperCollins’s Amistad Press is the oldest imprint devoted to titles for the African American market at any major New York publishing house. More

Publishing Firsts: The Historical Romance Genre

At the time of its publication in 1972, nothing like Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower had ever been published. More

Native Son

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

Letter to Eleanor Roosevelt regarding a new autobiographical book

Harper editor and chairman of the board Cass Canfield sent this letter, dated April 10, 1951, to Eleanor Roosevelt... More

1938: Harper & Brothers publishes Richard Wright’s debut story collection…

Harper & Brothers publishes Richard Wright’s debut story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children. More

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s masterpiece, and winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. More

Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World

Seminal work that launched Gorbachev’s reform movement. More

Social Change: Thomas Nast, Illustrator

Illustrator Thomas Nast first made his name documenting the Civil War in all its gruesome reality, but he is best known for developing the political cartoon form and our modern depictions of Santa Claus. More

Social Change: African American Identity in the U.S.

HarperCollins has published a number of books that explore the racial identity of African Americans during periods of great social conflict. More

1958: Collins publishes the first English translation of Doctor Zhivago…

Collins publishes the first English translation of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. More

Stride Toward Freedom

Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott. More

Tales of the City

First book in Maupin’s acclaimed and groundbreaking series documenting San Francisco’s underground and gay culture. More

The Downing Street Years

Compelling account of Thatcher’s remarkable life in her own words. More