 | |
| Parent company | Simon & Schuster |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1959 |
| Founder | Alfred A. Knopf Jr., Simon Michael Bessie andHiram Haydn |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | New York City |
| Publication types | Books |
| Fiction genres | Children's literature |
| Imprints | Caitlyn Dlouhy Books |
| Owner | Kohlberg Kravis Roberts |
| Official website | simonandschusterpublishing |
Atheneum Books is a New York Citypublishing house established in 1959 byAlfred A. Knopf Jr., Simon Michael Bessie andHiram Haydn.Simon & Schuster has owned Atheneum properties since 1994, and it created Atheneum Books for Young Readers as animprint forchildren's literature in the 2000s.
Alfred A. Knopf Jr. left his family publishing houseAlfred A. Knopf and created Atheneum Books in 1959 with Simon Michael Bessie (Harpers) and Hiram Haydn (Random House).[1][a] It became the publisher ofPulitzer Prize winnersEdward Albee,Charles Johnson,James Merrill,Nikki Giovanni,Mona Van Duyn andTheodore H. White. It also publishedErnest Gaines' first bookCatherine Carmier (1964). Knopf recruited editorJean E. Karl to establish a Children's Book Department in 1961.[2][3] Atheneum acquired the reprint house Russell & Russell in 1965.[4]
Atheneum merged withCharles Scribner's Sons to become The Scribner Book Company in 1978. The acquisition included Rawson Associates. Scribner was acquired byMacmillan in 1984. Macmillan was purchased bySimon & Schuster in 1994.[5] After the merger, the Atheneum adult list was merged into Scribner and the Scribner children's line was merged into Atheneum.[6][7]
In the 2000s, the Simon & Schuster imprint Atheneum Books for Young Readers published the popularMay Bird fantasy series for young adults, inaugurated byMay Bird and the Ever After (2005), and theOlivia series of picture books featuringOlivia the pig (from 2000).The Higher Power of Lucky won the 2007Newbery Medal. In a 2007 online poll, theNational Education Association listedBunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery as one of its Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children.[8]
Alfred A. Knopf Jr., who left the noted publishing house run by his parents to become one of the founders of Atheneum Publishers in 1959, died on Saturday. He was 90, the last of the surviving founders, and lived in New York City.
In 1978 Scribner acquired Atheneum, publishers of Edward Albee, Charles Johnson, and Theodore H. White. The Atheneum acquisition also brought with it the Rawson Associates imprint. And in 1984, the Scribner Book Companies, which by then included a great children's division and a distinguished reference division, merged with Macmillan.
| Founders | .svg) | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Investments | |||||||||||||||||
| Subsidiaries |
| ||||||||||||||||
| Former | |||||||||||||||||
| Related | |||||||||||||||||
