Dutton

A focused imprint with a huge audience, Dutton is part of the largest English-language publisher in the world. Dutton’s deeply discussable titles have become bestsellers, been national book club picks, and won the National Book Award. Publicity—and marketing—driven, its list of sixty books per year is half nonfiction and half fiction. Dutton’s imprints include Plume and Tiny Reparations Books.

eponymous E. P. Dutton & Co. began to publish books in earnest. Its original focus was on religious titles, and the first bestseller was the two-volume The Life of Christ by Frederic W. Farrar, published in 1874.

In 1885, John Macrae began working at Dutton as an office boy; he would spend fifty-nine years with the company, rising in the ranks. He became President in 1923, and in 1928, he bought the publishing house and shared it with his two sons. During Macrae’s tenure, E. P. Dutton published notable books such as The Proper Bostonians by Cleveland Amory,Shakespeare of London by Marchette Chute, The Conquest of Everest by Sir John Hunt, and Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, as well as works by Lawrence Durrell, Milton Glaser, and Luigi Pirandello.

The company went on to publish books by John Irving (The World According to Garp), James Beard, Peter Matthiessen, Jorge Luis Borges, Gavin Maxwell, Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Gail Sheehy (Passages), Ayn Rand, and Mickey Spillane. Dutton joined the Penguin Publishing Group in 1986, and in 2015 became an imprint of the newly merged Penguin Random House.