In 1972, Paris Review editor George Plimpton and a band of writers walked up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan selling their own books from pushcarts, protesting their publishers’ sluggishness in promoting and distributing their work. Inspired, Bill Henderson, a thirty-one-year-old editor at Doubleday, and his then-wife, Nancy, started Pushcart Press in their studio apartment in Yonkers, New York. Named after Plimpton’s demonstration, Pushcart aimed to elevate overlooked writers and small presses.
“I was, and still am, angry about writers who are suppressed by commercial publishers,” says Henderson, who in 1971, under, with Nautilus Books, a press he founded with his uncle in New Jersey after his book had been rejected by all the major New York publishers.
