Seven Stories Press
The Seven Stories story began in 1983–84 when Dan Simon came across a story by Nelson Algren called “A Bottle of Milk for Mother” in an old anthology edited by Robert Penn Warren that Simon bought from a street vendor for a dollar. He then read everything Algren wrote that he could find and discovered that Algren’s books—all of them—had been allowed to go out of print. Simon’s friend and colleague Glenn Thompson, founder and publisher of Writers and Readers Publishing, encouraged Simon to see if he could obtain the rights, offering to give him his own imprint and to cover the printing costs. The first books—The Neon Wilderness, then Never Come Morning—were published as “Dan Simon/Four Walls Eight Windows” books at Writers and Readers, which at the time was distributed in the US by W.W. Norton, where Simon was working as an assistant editor after grad school when he met Glenn. The Algren books sold well and got some attention.