Ticknor and Fields

Ticknor and Fields
Ticknor and Fields colophon, c. 1867
StatusDefunct
Founded1832
FounderWilliam Davis Ticknor and John Allen
SuccessorHoughton Mifflin
Country of originUnited States
Headquarters locationBoston
Key peopleJames T. Fields, James R. Osgood
Publication typesBooks, Magazines

Ticknor and Fields was an American publishing company based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded as a bookstore in 1832, the business published many 19th-century American authors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain. It also became an early publisher of The Atlantic Monthly and North American Review.

The firm was named after founder William Davis Ticknor and apprentice James T. Fields, although the names of additional business partners would come and go, notably that of James R. Osgood in the firm's later years. Financial problems led Osgood to merge the company with the publishing firm of Henry Oscar Houghton in 1878, forming a precursor to the modern publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Houghton Mifflin revived the Ticknor and Fields name as an imprint from 1979 to 1989.


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