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{{short description|American publishing company}}
{{Infobox publisher
| image = Viking Press logo.png
| parent = [[Penguin Random House]]
| status = Active
| founded = {{start date and age|1925}}
| founders = [[Harold K. Guinzburg]], [[George Oppenheimer]]
| successor =
| country = United States
| headquarters = [[New York City]]
| distribution =
| keypeople = President-Brian Tart, Children's publisher Kenneth Wright
| publications =
| topics =
| genre =
| imprints = {{Plain list |
* Viking Kestrel
* Viking Adult
* Viking children's Books
* Viking Portable Library
}}
| revenue =
| numemployees =
| nasdaq =
| website = {{URL|https://www.penguin.com/overview-vikingbooks/|penguin.com/vikingbooks}}
}}

'''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. Oppenheim<ref name=newyork>{{cite book|author1=Kenneth T. Jackson|author2=Lisa Keller|author3=Nancy Flood|title=The Encyclopedia of New York City: Second Edition|publisher=Yale University Press|year=1995|location=[[New York City]]|url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780300055368|isbn=978-0300055368|url-access=registration}}</ref> and then acquired by the [[Penguin Group]] in 1975.<ref>{{cite journal|editor1-last=Egli|title=Viking Press Is Sold To Penguin Books|journal=[[School Library Journal]]|publisher=[[Media Source Inc.]]|location=[[New York City]]|volume=22|issue=4|page=16|year=1975}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1975/11/11/archives/viking-press-is-sold-to-penguin-books.html|first=Alden|last=Whitman|author-link=Alden Whitman|title=Viking Press Is Sold to Penguin Books|work=[[The New York Times]]|location=[[New York City]]|date=November 11, 1975|access-date=May 28, 2020}}</ref>

==History==
Guinzburg, a Harvard graduate and former employee of Simon and Schuster and Oppenheimer, a graduate of Williams College and Alfred A. Knopf, founded Viking in 1925 with the goal of publishing nonfiction and "distinguished fiction with some claim to permanent importance rather than ephemeral popular interest."<ref name=NYTObit>{{cite news|last=Weber|first=Bruce|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/arts/10guinzburg.html|title=Thomas Guinzburg, Paris Review Co-Founder, Dies at 84|work=[[The New York Times]]|location=[[New York City]]|date=September 10, 2010|access-date=September 13, 2010}}</ref> [[B. W. Huebsch]] joined the firm shortly afterward. Harold Guinzburg's son [[Thomas Guinzburg|Thomas]] became president in 1961.<ref name=NYTObit/>

The firm's name and logo—a [[Viking ship]] drawn by [[Rockwell Kent]]—were meant to evoke the ideas of adventure, exploration, and enterprise implied by the word "[[Viking]]."

In August 1961, they acquired H.B. Huesbsch, which maintained a list of backlist titles from authors such as James Joyce and [[Sherwood Anderson]]. The first imprint was ''The Book of American Negro Spirituals'', edited by [[James Weldon Johnson]]. The young firm focused on aggressive advertising and a liberal return policy. These policies, along with popular fiction authors Dorothy Parker, D. H. Lawrence and Erskine Caldwell, as well as non-fiction authors Bertrand Russell and Mohandis Gandhi, helped the firm weather the Depression.

The house has been home to many prominent authors of fiction, non-fiction, and play scripts. Five Viking authors have been awarded [[Nobel Prize for Literature|Nobel Prizes for Literature]] and one received the [[Nobel Peace Prize]]; Viking books have also won numerous [[Pulitzer Prizes]], [[National Book Award]]s, and other important literary prizes.

In 1943, the Viking Portable Library was introduced, a series designed to provide compact, well-printed anthologies for the general reader and college students. These compilations encompassed works by Hemingway, Steinbeck and Shakespeare. Over the next decade, Viking published works by Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Rumer Godden and Rex Stout. Saul Bellow published his third novel, ''The Adventure of Augie March'' in 1953, and would publish his next five works with the press, including the Pulitzer Prize winning ''Humboldt's Gift'' in 1975. In 1957, Jack Kerouac's ''On the Road'' was published by the press, and during the 1960s Viking published works by Hannah Arendt, Theodore Draper, Zbignew Brzezinski, Ian Fleming, Ken Kesey, and Jimmy Breslin.

Viking publishes approximately 75 books a year. It has published both successful commercial fiction and acclaimed literary fiction and non-fiction, and its paperbacks are most often published by Penguin Books. Viking's current president is [[Brian Tart]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.thebookseller.com/tags-bookseller/brian-tart|title=Brian Tart {{!}} The Bookseller|website=www.thebookseller.com|language=en|access-date=2017-09-13}}</ref>

==Imprints==
* Viking Kestrel
* Viking Adult, who got in legal trouble in 1946 due to John Steinbeck's bold eulogy, and fell out of public favor in 1947{{clarify|date=May 2023}}
* Viking children's Books
* Viking Portable Library
* Pamela Dorman Books

===Viking Children's===

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 [[imprint (trade name)|imprints]].

Its books have won the [[Newbery Medal|Newbery]] and [[Caldecott Medal|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 (book)|Corduroy]]'', ''[[Make Way for Ducklings]]'', ''[[The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales|The Stinky Cheese Man]]'' by [[Jon Scieszka]] and [[Lane Smith (illustrator)|Lane Smith]] (1993), ''[[The Outsiders (novel)|The Outsiders]]'', ''[[Pippi Longstocking]]'', and ''[[The Story of Ferdinand]]''. Its paperbacks are now published by [[Puffin Books]], which includes the Speak and [[Firebird Books|Firebird]] imprints. From 2012 and {{As of|2016|lc=yes}}, Viking Children's publisher is Kenneth Wright.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.penguin.com/meet/publishers/vikingchildrensbooks/|website=[[Penguin Random House]]|title=Viking Children's Books|access-date=April 17, 2016}}</ref>

===Viking Critical Library===

The '''Viking Critical Library''' offers academic editions of [[Classic book|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.

;Titles
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Author !! Title !! Editor
!Year published!! Notes
|-
| [[Don DeLillo]] || ''[[White Noise (novel)|White Noise]]'' || Mark Osteen
|1998|| .
|-
| [[Graham Greene]] || ''[[The Quiet American]]'' || John Clark Pratt
|1996||
|-
| [[James Joyce]] || ''[[Dubliners]]'' || [[Robert Scholes]]
|1996||
|-
| James Joyce || ''[[Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]]'' || Chester G. Anderson
|1977|| The only title known to include explanatory end notes.
|-
| [[Ken Kesey]] || ''[[One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel)|One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest]]'' || John Clark Pratt
|1977|| Out of print.
|-
| [[Jack Kerouac]] || ''[[On the Road]]'' || Scott Donaldson
|1979|| Out of print.
|-
| [[Arthur Miller]] || ''[[The Crucible]]'' || Gerald Weales
|1996||
|-
| Arthur Miller || ''[[Death of a Salesman]]'' || Gerald Weales
|1996||
|-
| [[John Steinbeck]] || ''[[The Grapes of Wrath]]'' || Kevin Hearle
|1997||
|}

==Notable authors==
{{div col |colwidth=16em}}
* [[Abdullah II of Jordan|Abdullah II]], [[King of Jordan]]
* [[Kingsley Amis]]
* [[Sherwood Anderson]]
* [[Hannah Arendt]]
* [[Antony Beevor]]
* [[Saul Bellow]]
* [[Ludwig Bemelmans]]
* [[Dan Blum]]
* [[T. C. Boyle]]
* [[Geraldine Brooks (writer)|Geraldine Brooks]]
* [[Daniel James Brown]]
* [[William S. Burroughs]]
* [[Lan Cao]]
* [[Rosanne Cash]]
* [[Ferreira de Castro]]
* [[J. M. Coetzee]]
* [[Leonard Cohen]]
* [[Roald Dahl]]
* [[Theodore Draper]]
* [[Lawrence Durrell]]
* [[Kim Edwards]]
* [[Daniel Ellsberg]]
* [[Helen Fielding]]
* [[Frederick Forsyth]]
* [[Don Freeman]]
* [[Tana French]]
* [[Elizabeth George]]
* [[Elizabeth Gilbert]]
* [[Rumer Godden]]
* [[Will Gompertz]]
* [[Graham Greene]]
* [[R. K. Narayan]]
* [[Robert Greene (American author)|Robert Greene]]
* [[Martha Grimes]]
* [[S. E. Hinton]]
* [[David Irving]]
* [[Kristopher Jansma]]
* [[James Weldon Johnson]]
* [[James Joyce]]
* [[Jan Karon]]
* [[Ezra Jack Keats]]
* [[Garrison Keillor]]
* [[William Kennedy (author)|William Kennedy]]
* [[Jack Kerouac]]
* [[Ken Kesey]]
* [[Sue Monk Kidd]]
* [[Stephen King]]
* [[Jamil Jan Kochai]]
* [[D. H. Lawrence]]
* [[Tobsha Learner]]
* [[Rebecca Makkai]]
* [[Hilary Mantel]]
* [[Peter Matthiessen]]
* [[Robert McCloskey]]
* [[Terry McMillan]]
* [[Arthur Miller]]
* [[Jojo Moyes]]
* [[John Julius Norwich]]
* [[Barack Obama]]
* [[Michelle Obama]]
* [[Octavio Paz]]
* [[Steven Pinker]]
* [[Thomas Pynchon]]
* [[Ruth Sawyer]]
* [[Jon Scieszka]]
* [[Kate Seredy]]
* [[Katherine Binney Shippen]]
* [[Upton Sinclair]]
* [[Wallace Stegner]]
* [[John Steinbeck]]
* [[Rex Stout]]
* [[August Strindberg]]
* [[Simms Taback]]
* [[Whitney Terrell]]
* [[Barbara Tuchman]]
* [[Carl Van Doren]]
* [[William T. Vollmann]]
* [[David Foster Wallace]]
* [[Rosemary Wells]]
* [[Rebecca West]]
* [[Patrick White]]
*[[Vikram Sampath]]
{{div col end}}

==Notable editors==
* [[Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis]], consulting editor
* Wendy Wolf, vice president and associate editor, 1994-

== Awards ==
* 10 Newbery Medals
* 10 Caldecott Medals
* 27 Newbery Honors
* 33 Caldecott Honors
* 1 American Book Award
* 2 Coretta Scott King Awards
* 3 Batcheldor Honors
* 5 Christopher Medals
* 2 Margaret A. Edwards Awards for authors [[S. E. Hinton]] and [[Richard Peck (writer)|Richard Peck]]

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

==Further reading==
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.

== External links ==
* [https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/publishers/penguin-general/viking Viking Press overview] at [[Penguin Group|Penguin]]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20061028174548/http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/aboutus/adult/viking.html Viking Press history] at Penguin (page from August 28, 2006 stored by the Internet Archive)
* [http://www.penguin.com/publishers/vikingchildrensbooks/ Viking Children's Books overview] at Penguin
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20080426192733/http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/aboutus/youngreaders/vikingyr.html Viking Children's Books history] at Penguin (page from April 26, 2008 stored by the Internet Archive)

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[[Category:Viking Press books| ]]
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[[Category:1975 mergers and acquisitions]]
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Viking Press - Revision history

Ajay Kumar: Created a new article