Background
Doran was born on December 19, 1869 in Toronto, Canada, of Irish Presbyterian parents.
Doran was born on December 19, 1869 in Toronto, Canada, of Irish Presbyterian parents.
Reared in a staunchly Calvinist atmosphere, Doran began his publishing career at fourteen, when he left school to work for the Willard Tract Depository of Toronto. Under the tutelage of S. R. Briggs, the firm's smug but commercially adept founder, Doran became familiar with every aspect of the religious book trade during the next seven years. In 1892 he decided that publishing opportunities were too circumscribed in Canada and moved to Chicago, where he joined Fleming H. Revell and Company, a house that catered to the publishing needs of the lesser evangelical denominations. Doran's energetic salesmanship and personal charm soon brought new accounts to the company, and at the age of twenty-four he became a vice-president. Like other religious publishers of the late nineteenth century, Revell was cautiously expanding its lists to include more general offerings. This secularizing trend met with Doran's enthusiastic approval, and he was instrumental in adding such popular authors as Roswell Field and Charles W. Gordon ("Ralph Connor") to Revell's list. But despite these changes, the company remained essentially a publisher of religious books, and Doran grew progressively disenchanted with its inhibiting conservatism.
In 1908 he returned to Toronto to establish his own firm, George H. Doran Company, Limited, in partnership with Hodder and Stoughton, English religious publishers who agreed to supply him with their extensive list of fiction, art, and children's books for distribution in the United States and Canada. The following year he moved his headquarters to New York City, as he had planned from the start. Doran's intuitive grasp of the public taste and his willingness to take chances on new authors enabled him immediately to make relatively large profits. His first widely popular publication was Ralph Connor's novel, The Foreigner, which sold 125, 000 copies in 1909. That same year Doran also gambled successfully on an obscure English novelist, Arnold Bennett, whose Old Wives' Tale he brought out at the urging of his wife. The publication of this work established Bennett's vogue in America and led to an enduring friendship between the author and Doran, who became Bennett's exclusive American publisher. Bennett also helped him to obtain contracts from such rising English literary figures as Hugh Walpole and Frank Swinnerton.
Doran's transatlantic connections were further enlarged through his purchase in 1910 of A. C. Armstrong and Son, a New York firm that was the American distributor of Hodder and Stoughton's religious titles. To keep abreast of literary fashions abroad, he made frequent trips to England, where his rooms at London's Hotel Savoy became a favorite meeting place for writers and agents. His British sympathies during World War I led him to publish propaganda for the British Ministry of Information, along with the writings of Theodore Roosevelt, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and other advocates of American intervention. Besides adding another popular novelist to his lists, Doran's wartime association with Mrs. Rinehart produced unexpected personal results. Influenced by such able young editors as Eugene Saxton and John Chipman Farrar, Doran continued to publish new and unconventional authors of promise in the 1920's, including Stephen Vincent Benet, Du Bose Heyward, Hervey Allen, Michael Arlen, W. Somerset Maugham, and Aldous Huxley.
In September 1918 the firm acquired The Bookman from Dodd, Mead and Company and brought that prestigious but commercially unprofitable journal to new heights of literary excellence under Farrar's editorship (1921-1927). Deploring the acquiescence of younger publishers in what he considered the debasement of public taste, Doran later recalled that he had personally expunged certain "obscene" passages from John Dos Passos' Three Soldiers (1921) and had "flatly rejected" works by Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and "that ruffian Dreiser. "
In 1925 Doran bought out his English partners, and two years later his firm merged with Doubleday, Page and Company. The new house, Doubleday, Doran and Company, was the largest trade publisher in the United States. But the union was short-lived; personality clashes and policy disagreements led Farrar and Stanley Rinehart to withdraw in June 1929 to found their own company, and Doran resigned the following year. After employment as a traveling representative of William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, he retired from publishing in 1934 to write his memoirs.
Many of his later years were spent on an Arizona ranch, from which he moved back to Toronto as his eightieth birthday approached. Still vigorous and flamboyant, he took up residence in the Royal York Hotel, where he enjoyed celebrity status as "the last of the impresario publishers" until his death, which occurred on January 7, 1956.
Doran is best known as the founder of George H. Doran Company. When it merged with Doubleday, Page & Company in 1927, it made Doubleday, Doran the largest publishing business in the English-speaking world. Doran moved frequently from New York City to London, England during his publishing career, and was well acquainted with most of the writers he published.
A Victorian gentleman in spite of himself, Doran was repelled by the nihilism of the most creative postwar writers, whose use of earthy language and often shocking themes he considered a betrayal of a socially responsible literary tradition.
Quotations: Doran never completely outgrew his fundamentalist background: "I would publish no book which destroyed a man's simple faith in God without providing an adequate substitute, " he asserted in his autobiography. "I would publish no book which would destroy the institution of marriage without providing a substitute order of society which would be protective of the younger generations. All else I would cheerfully publish. "
Doran had become a naturalized American citizen in October 1896, and his American attachments had been further strengthened by his marriage in 1895 to Mary Noble McConnell of Evanston, Illinois. In 1919 Mrs. Rinehart's son Stanley married Doran's only child, Mary, and joined the Doran firm.
