100 Years of Simon & Schuster Books and Authors

The publisher – one of the Big 5 – was founded in 1924 by Richard Simon and Max Schuster.

In 2024, Simon and Schuster marks its centennial year. Publishers Weekly notes the milestone with a special report.

“As the company celebrates its 100th anniversary, CEO Jonathan Karp said the DNA of the company is very much the same as ever,” reports Andrew Albanese, PW executive editor. “S&S, Karp says, remains an independent-minded publisher that has always taken a chance on authors and books.”

One of the Big 5, the publisher was founded in 1924 by Richard Simon and Max Schuster. S&S’s first full list featured a biography of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who was a hero of Schuster’s. A year later, S&S published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and in following years, books by Ernest Hemingway, Dale Carnegie, and Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, among many others.

“Leon Shimkin—the silent, third S, one might say – joined S&S in its first year as business manager. He was just 17 at the time, but he quickly became involved with virtually all the publisher’s major business decisions,” Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “Shimkin worked with Robert Fair de Graff to launch America’s first paperback publisher, Pocket Books, in 1939.

Shimkin eventually became sole owner of S&S. He sold the company to Gulf+Western in 1975, kicking off the corporate era of publishing, Albanese noted.

Every Friday, CCC’s “Velocity of Content” features the editors and reporters of Publishers Weekly for an early look at what news publishers, editors, authors, agents, and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.