Gerald Duckworth and Company was founded in London in 1898 by Gerald de l'Etang Duckworth. In its first years Duckworth published plays (including those of John Galsworthy), and serious fiction, and from 1902 art criticism and biography in the Popular Library of Art Series. With connections to the English academic and literary establishment, the firm went on to publish many of Britain's great literary authors, including Evelyn Waugh, the Sitwells, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.
Duckworth was purchased in 2003 by Peter Mayer, owner of Overlook Press in the United States.
