William Heinemann

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William Heinemann (18 May 1863 – 5 October 1920) was the founder of the Heinemann publishing house in London.

He was born in 1863, in Surbiton, Surrey. In his early life he wanted to be a musician, either as a performer or a composer, but, realising that he lacked the ability to be successful in that field, he took a job with the music publishing company of Nicolas Trübner. It was an intensive apprenticeship, and when Trübner died, Heinemann founded his own publishing house in Covent Garden in 1890. The company introduced many translations of the classics to Great Britain, as well as such distinguished authors as H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling.

He died, unexpectedly, in London in 1920. He had no children and his presumptive heir, his nephew John Heinemann, had died in the Great War. Heinemann's share of the company was therefore bought out by F.N. Doubleday, the New York publisher.

He bequeathed funds to the Royal Society of Literature to establish a literary prize, the W. H. Heinemann Award, given from 1945 to 2003.

The company logo is based on a woodcut by Sir William Nicholson of the windmill at Rottingdean, Sussex.

[edit] Sources

Linda Marie Fritschner, ‘Heinemann, William (1863–1920)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 15 June 2006