W. W. Norton and Company is an American publisher founded in New York in 1923 by William Warder Norton and Mary Herter Norton, and has been wholly owned by its employees since the early 1960s, which makes it the largest employee-owned publisher in the United States.
That ownership structure is not incidental. It has allowed the house to publish serious nonfiction and scholarship on longer commercial horizons than a corporately owned publisher would tolerate, and its Norton Anthologies are fixtures of American higher education.
It published Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel in 1997, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction the following year and became one of the most widely read works of popular history of the past half century.