Mariner Books traces its beginnings to 1832 when William Ticknor cofounded the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, from which he would run the legendary firm Ticknor and Fields, publisher of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Following Ticknor’s death, Henry Oscar Houghton acquired Ticknor and Fields and, in 1880, formed Houghton Mifflin, which later merged with venerable Harcourt Publishing to form Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. HarperCollins purchased HMH’s trade publishing business in 2021 and reestablished their storied lists and editorial team under the name Mariner Books.
Uniting the legacies of Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt Brace, and Ticknor and Fields, Mariner Books continues one of the great traditions in American bookselling. Our imprints have introduced an incomparable roster of enduring classics, including Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Thoreau’s Walden, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Ann Petry’s The Narrows, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, and many others. Today Mariner Books remains proudly committed to the craft of fine publishing established nearly two centuries ago at the Old Corner Bookstore.
