W. W. Norton & Company

W. W. Norton & Company
Status	Active
Founded	1923; 102 years ago
Founders	William Warder Norton; Mary Dows Herter Norton;
Country of origin	United States
Headquarters location	500 Fifth Avenue, New York City, New York
Distribution	self-distributed (US); Penguin Random House (Canada trade); Nelson Canada (Canada textbooks); John Wiley & Sons (UK, Australia)
Key people	Julia A. Reidhead; (President)
Publication types	Books
Imprints	Countryman ; Liveright ; Norton Professional ; Norton Young Readers
No. of employees	500
Official website	wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company is an American publishing company based in New York City. Established in 1923, it has been owned wholly by its employees since the early 1960s. The company is known for its Norton Anthologies (particularly The Norton Anthology of English Literature) and its texts in the Norton Critical Editions series, both of which are frequently assigned in university literature courses.^[3]

History and overview

The roots of the company date to 1923, when William Warder Norton founded the firm with his wife Mary Dows Herter Norton, and became its first president. In the 1960s, Mary Norton offered most of her stock to its leading editors and managers.^[4] Storer D. Lunt took over in 1945 after Norton's death, and was succeeded by George Brockway (1957–1976), Donald S. Lamm (1976–1994), W. Drake McFeely (1994–2017),^[5] and Julia A. Reidhead (2017–present). Reidhead was vice president and publishing director of Norton's College division and a former editor of the Norton Anthologies.^[6]

Imprints of W. W. Norton include Norton Professional Books (professional works in mental health, well-being, architecture and design, and education), Countryman Press (lifestyle and instructional books, including healthy-living, cookbooks, and hiking guides), Liveright (20th century classics and new works), and Norton Young Readers (books for preschoolers to young adults).

In 2023, the company turned 100 years old.^[7]

Series

Norton Anthologies

Norton Anthologies collect canonical works from various literatures; perhaps the best known anthology in the series is the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which, as of 2018^[update], is in its 10th edition. Norton Anthologies offer general headnotes on each author, a general introduction to each period of literature, and annotations for every anthologized text.

Norton Critical Editions

Like Oxford World's Classics and Penguin Classics, Norton Critical Editions provide reprints of classic literature and in some cases, classic non-fiction works. However, unlike most critical editions, all Norton Critical Editions are sourcebooks that provide a selection of contextual documents and critical essays along with an edited text. Annotations to the text are provided as footnotes, rather than as endnotes.