Hill & Wang was founded as an independent publishing house in 1956 by Arthur Wang (1917/18–2005) and Lawrence Hill, who were both working at A. A. Wyn. They bought backlist books from Wyn and started Dramabooks,[1] publishing plays in trade paperback, then a new format. The series included Jean Cocteau, Arthur L. Kopit and Lanford Wilson. In 1959, Arthur Wang acquired Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir, Night, which had been turned down by several English-language publishers, publishing it in 1960. They continued to build the Hill & Wang list to include such authors as Roland Barthes, Langston Hughes, and American historians Stanley Kutler and William Cronon.[2]
