Houghton Mifflin Company is a leading educational publisher in the United States. They publish textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, reference works, fiction and non-fiction for both young readers and adults, and the Best American series - annual collections of previously-published fiction and non-fiction.
Company history
In 1832, William Ticknor and James Fields had gathered an impressive list of writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau. The duo formed a close relationship with Riverside Press, a Boston printing company owned by Henry Oscar Houghton. Shortly after, Houghton also founded a publishing company with partner George Mifflin. In 1880, Ticknor and Fields, and Houghton and Mifflin merged their operations, combining the literary works of writers with the expertise of a publisher, creating a new partnership named Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Shortly thereafter, the company established an Educational Department and from 1891 to 1908, sales of educational materials increased by five hundred percent. Soon after 1916, Houghton Mifflin became involved in publishing standardized tests and testing materials, working closely with developers of such tests, including E.F. Lindquist. The company was the fourth-largest educational publisher in the United States in 1921. Today, the company has three assessment divisons: Riverside Publishing, Edusoft, and Promissor.
In 1967, Houghton Mifflin became a publically traded company on the New York Stock Exchange under symbol HTN. (The company no longer trades under this symbol.)
During the 1990s, Houghton Mifflin acquired both McDougal Littell and Company, an educational publisher for secondary school materials, and D.C. Heath and Company, a publisher of supplemental educational materials. In 1996, the company created their Great Source Education Group to combine the supplemental material product lines of their School Division and these two companies.
In 2001, Houghton Mifflin was acquired by an international media group, Vivendi Universal, but shortly thereafter was sold to Thomas H. Lee, Bain Capital, and The Blackstone Group, who remain the current owners.
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