Hill & Wang

Hill & Wang, New Publisher, Formed; Buys Titles of Wyn, PW, Feb. 18, 1956, at 1034.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Acquiring Hill & Wang, PW, Oct. 4, 1971, at 30.

https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/archivalcollections/pdf/979_0.pdf:

Hill and Wang (H & W) was founded in 1952 by Lawrence Hill and Arthur Wang. Arthur Wang was born in 1918 in Westchester, New York and received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College. In 1942, he joined Garden City Publishing Co., a division of Doubleday, as an editor. From there he moved to Alfred A. Knopf, T.Y. Crowell, and A.A. Wyn, where he became an editor-in-chief and met Lawrence Hill, then a sales manager. Hill and Wang started their own firm with the purchase of Wyn's entire backlist of eighty-eight titles.

Hill & Wang (H & W) earned its initial reputation by inaugurating the Dramabooks series (1952). Dramabooks originally presented the work of such drama critics as G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Its Mermaids series also presented seventeenth-century English plays. Eventually, the works of such twentieth-century playwrights as Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Jean Anouilh, Max Frisch and Arthur Kopit were added to the Dramabooks series. Dramabooks also includes ten volumes of Lanford Wilson's plays including Hot L Baltimore (1970).