In January, S&S kicked off its centennial year with the release of The Simon & Schuster 100, a selection of 100 titles the company has published over its history—and as Karp suggests, what began with a windfall from four bestselling crossword puzzle books in 1924 quickly, and impressively, expanded. S&S’s first full list in 1924 would feature a biography of Joseph Pulitzer (a hero of Schuster’s), a poetry book, and Harvey Landrum—the only novel S&S published that year despite getting 241 submissions. A year later, S&S published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and in the following years heavyweights such as Ernest Hemingway and Dale Carnegie joined the list, as did Margaret Mitchell for her epic Gone with the Wind.
In choosing a list of 100 books to showcase, Karp said the goal was to show “the cultural sweep” of S&S’s publishing program over the past 100 years. It was no small task for a program that has yielded 61 Pulitzer Prize winners, 18 National Book Award winners, 18 Newbery winners, and 15 Caldecott winners. The original motto of S&S was to publish books that are “commercial, successful, and culture defining,” Karp noted. “That is still our mission today.” Read more
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