William Warder Norton was born on September 17, 1891 in Springfield, Ohio, United States. He was the only child of Percy Norton, a patent lawyer, and Emily (Warder) Norton. His father's family, of English descent, had moved to Springfield from Jericho, Vermont. His mother, who died when the boy was two, came of a family that had moved west from Philadelphia around 1800 to escape yellow fever. John Aston Warder, Ohio physician, horticulturist, and forester, was his great-uncle.
Norton attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and Ohio State University, where he studied mechanical engineering. Vigorous, restless, and questing, he left college after three years, in 1912.
Norton became foreign sales manager of Kilbourne & Jacobs Manufacturing Company of Columbus, Ohio. Subsequently he joined Harrisons & Crossfield, Ltd. , an English trading firm in Philadelphia, traveled widely for them, and in 1916 opened their export office in New York.
When the United States entered World War I he became a supply officer in the Naval Overseas Transport Service. Though he reentered the export business after the war, Norton's interests gradually shifted. He worked at Greenwich House, a New York settlement, and in 1921 became treasurer of the American Association of Social Workers.
He took courses at the New School for Social Research and was one of the organizers and chairman (1920 - 22) of the New School Association, the student group supporting the school. Membership on the board of trustees of the People's Institute further strengthened his interest in adult education.
For a time Norton toyed with the idea of starting a short-story magazine to include foreign stories (in translation) as well as American material, old and new. Though this scheme did not work out, the idea of publishing had taken root in his mind, and in the summer of 1923 he and his wife composed a letter to Everett Dean Martin, director of the People's Institute, proposing publication of the lecture courses given by the Institute at the Cooper Union Forum. Martin's reply was a telegram asking the Nortons to come to Nantucket to discuss the project, which that fall took form as the People's Institute Publishing Company. Martin's own Psychology was the first publication; others were Harry A. Overstreet's Influencing Human Behavior and John B. Watson's Behaviorism. The lectures were taken down and transcribed by a stenographer each week, edited in the evening by the Nortons, and printed in separate pamphlets that were distributed week by week to subscribers and collected into slipcases for sale in bookstores. This format, however, proved awkward, and in 1926 Norton took the plunge and became a full-time publisher, changing the name of his firm to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. , changing his publications to regularly bound books, and spreading his editorial net far beyond the halls of the People's Institute. The total paid-in capital of his firm was $7, 500. Influenced by his reading of the English biologist T. H. Huxley, Norton from the start followed the principle that leaders of thought should wherever possible give their own accounts of work in their fields and not leave informing the public to popularizers. He was able to impress upon many the validity of that notion, with the result that early Norton authors included Walter B. Cannon, Edith Hamilton, Malvina Hoffman, Lancelot Hogben, H. S. Jennings, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Gustave Reese, and Bertrand Russell. The firm was modestly successful and grew steadily. The original publications in the field of psychology led to the special field of psychiatry and to Freud, Karen Horney, Otto Fenichel, and many others later. Mrs. Norton's interest in music resulted ultimately in perhaps the most extensive list of books on music in the English-speaking world. The firm branched out into fiction (Henry Handel Richardson) and poetry (Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Mrs. Norton). The expanding list of serious nonfiction led to the starting of a college department.
Norton maintained his interest in adult education, served as treasurer of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy, was at various times chairman of the Joint Board of Publishers and Booksellers, president of the National Association of Book Publishers (1934), and president of the Publishers Lunch Club. He was chairman of the Council on Books in Wartime, a joint industry endeavor that resulted in a tremendous outpouring of paperback books distributed to the men and women in the armed services--some 1, 180 different titles in a total of 123 million books.
Warder Norton (as he was known to his friends) was a man of quick enthusiasm and firm loyalty. He expended himself unreservedly in any cause he undertook.
On June 6, 1922 Norton married Mary Dows Herter, daughter of the physician Christian A. Herter. They had one daughter, Anne Aston Warder Norton.
