Harcourt (publisher)

Harcourt was a United States publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. The company was based in San Diego, California, with Editorial / Sales / Marketing / Rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida.

In 2007, the U.S. Schools Education and Trade Publishing parts of Harcourt Education were sold by Reed Elsevier to Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group.Harcourt Assessment and Harcourt Education International were acquired by Pearson, the international education and information company, in January 2008. Houghton Mifflin acquired Harcourt in 2007, and assumed the Harcourt name in the Houghton Mifflin name to form Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. As of 2012, all Harcourt books that have been rereleased are now under the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt name, while the Harcourt Children's Books division left the name intact on all of its books under that name as part of HMH.

History

World Book Company (1905)

The first-created component of what would eventually become Harcourt was the World Book Company (unrelated to the Chicago-based World Book, Inc. publisher of reference works), which opened its first office in Manila in 1905 and published English-language educational materials for schools in the Philippines. The company later moved to New York, where it became a test publisher. Much of the company's success was based on the work of Arthur S. Otis, who was best known for the intelligence tests he developed for the U.S. Army. Millions of World War I draftees took Otis's tests.

Children's literature

Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are enjoyed by children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader.

Children's literature can be traced to stories and songs, part of a wider oral tradition, that adults shared with children before publishing existed. The development of early children's literature, before printing was invented, is difficult to trace. Even after printing became widespread, many classic "children's" tales were originally created for adults and later adapted for a younger audience. Since the 15th century, a large quantity of literature, often with a moral or religious message, has been aimed specifically at children. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became known as the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as this period included the publication of many books acknowledged today as classics.

Introduction

There is no single or widely used definition of children's literature. It can be broadly defined as anything that children read or more specifically defined as fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or drama intended for and used by children and young people. Nancy Anderson, of the College of Education at the University of South Florida, defines children's literature as "all books written for children, excluding works such as comic books, joke books, cartoon books, and non-fiction works that are not intended to be read from front to back, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference materials".