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Little, Brown and Company is a publishing house established by Charles Coffin Little and his partner, James Brown. The company traces its history back to a bookstore founded by Ebenezer Battelle in 1784, Marlborough Street, Boston. Little and Brown, partners in the bookstore and former clerks, founded their company in 1837 (as "Charles C. Little and James Brown"), and were joined a year later by Augustus Flagg. In 1847 the firm's name was changed to Little, Brown and Company. Flagg took over as managing partner after the death of Little in 1869 (James Brown had died in 1855).

The firm initially specialized in legal treatises and imported titles. Even so, in the early years Little and Brown published William H. Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, Jones Very's first book of poetry (edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson), Letters of John Adams and works by James Russell Lowell and Francis Parkman. In 1853 Little, Brown began publishing the works of British poets from Chaucer to Wordsworth. There were ninety-six volumes published in the series in five years.

In 1859 John Bartlett became a partner in the firm. He held the rights to his Familiar Quotations, and Little, Brown published the 15th edition of the work in 1980, 125 years after its first publication.

John Murray Brown, James Brown's son, took over when Augustus Flagg retired in 1884. In the 1890s Little, Brown expanded into general publishing, including fiction. In 1896 it published Quo Vadis. In 1898 Little, Brown purchased a list of titles from the Roberts Brothers firm. This brought Edward Everett Hale, Helen Hunt Jackson and Louisa May Alcott into association with the firm.

John Murray Brown died in 1908 and James W. McIntyre became managing partner. When McIntyre died in 1913, Little, Brown incorporated. In 1925 Little, Brown entered into an agreement to publish all Atlantic Monthly books. This arrangement lasted until 1985. During this time the joint Atlantic Monthly Press/Little Brown imprint published James Truslow Adams's The Adams Family, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall's Mutiny on the Bounty and its sequels, James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Walter D. Edmonds's Drums Along the Mohawk, William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, and Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine.

Other prominent authors published by Little, Brown in the 20th and early 21st centuries have included Donald Barthelme, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Hortense Calisher, Bruce Catton, A. J. Cronin, Peter De Vries, J. Frank Dobie, Sarah Dunant, John Feinstein, C. S. Forester, John Fowles, Malcolm Gladwell, Pete Hamill, Lillian Hellman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Kissinger, Elizabeth Kostova, Norman Mailer, William Manchester, Nelson Mandela, John P. Marquand, Masters and Johnson, Stephenie Meyer, Rick Moody, Ogden Nash, Edwin O'Connor, Erich Maria Remarque, J. D. Salinger, Alice Sebold, David Sedaris, George Stephanopoulos, Gore Vidal, Bob Vila, David Foster Wallace, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse and Herman Wouk. Little, Brown also published the photography of Ansel Adams.

The imprint was purchased by Time Inc. in 1968, and was made part of the Time Warner Book Group when Time merged with Warner Communications to form Time Warner in 1989. In 2006, the Time Warner Book Group was sold to French publisher Hachette Livre; the Little, Brown imprint is now used by Hachette Livre's U.S. publishing company, Hachette Book Group USA.

In May 2006, the publishing company received some brief bad publicity over plagiarism allegations levied against Kaavya Viswanathan for her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.

• Oliver, Bill (1986) Little, Brown and Company, in Peter Dzwonkonski, Ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography - Volume Forty-nine - American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638 - 1899 Part 1: A-M. Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company. ISBN 0-8103-1727-3

• Hachette Book Group USA