James Harper (publisher) - Publishing

Publishing

With his brother John, James founded the printer J. & J. Harper in 1817. The name was changed to Harper & Brothers in 1825 when the two other brothers, Wesley & Fletcher Harper, joined their brothers. With the name change the company also broadened their printing business to also include publishing services.

First big success was Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures (1836). Often described as the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of nativism", the book went on to sell 300,000 copies for Harper & Brothers. It was later disclosed that Theodore Dwight was the actual author of the work, though he claimed it was dictated. The book ostensibly told the story of a Canadian woman who claimed to have been a nun who had been sexually exploited in her convent. The work was published during a time of extreme anti-Catholicism in the United States, and was used by politicians and anti-Catholic activists to seed discontent and incite riots. In the words of the historian Ray Allen Billington, it became "the most influential single work of anti-Catholic propaganda in America's history".

Within eight years of the publication of Awful Disclosures James Harper was elected mayor of New York, running on a Know-Nothing, Nativist platform of anti-Catholicism and anti-immigration. Ms. Monk's book had a brief revival in the 1960s during John F. Kennedy's run for the Presidency of the United States.

Harper & Brothers became Harper & Row in 1962 when the firm merged with Row, Petersen & Co. Following News Corporation's acquisition of Harper & Row in 1987, the company was merged with William Collins publishers in 1990, resulting in its current name, HarperCollins. HarperCollins had sales of US$1,162 million in 2004 and employs over 3,000 people worldwide.