| Parent: | Penguin Random House |
| Status: | Active |
| Founders: | Harold K. Guinzburg, George Oppenheimer |
| Country: | United States |
| Headquarters: | New York City |
| Keypeople: | President-Brian Tart, Children's publisher Kenneth Wright |
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]
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]
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.
| Author | Title | Editor | Year published | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| White Noise | Mark Osteen | 1998 | . | ||
| The Quiet American | John Clark Pratt | 1996 | |||
| Dubliners | 1996 | ||||
| James Joyce | Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Chester G. Anderson | 1977 | The only title known to include explanatory end notes. | |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | John Clark Pratt | 1977 | Out of print. | ||
| On the Road | Scott Donaldson | 1979 | Out of print. | ||
| The Crucible | Gerald Weales | 1996 | |||
| Arthur Miller | Death of a Salesman | Gerald Weales | 1996 | ||
| The Grapes of Wrath | Kevin Hearle | 1997 |
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.