Among their initial publications were French author Émile Augier's Four Plays, Russian writer Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba, Polish novelist Stanisław Przybyszewski's novel Homo Sapiens, and French writer Guy de Maupassant's Yvette, a Novelette, and Ten Other Stories.

[6] During World War I these books were cheap to obtain and helped establish Knopf as an American firm publishing European works.

[9] For Floyd Dell's coming-of-age novel, Moon-Calf, they paid men to walk the streets of the financial and theatre districts dressed in artist costumes with sandwich boards.

[10] The unique look of their books along with their expertise in advertising their authors drew Willa Cather to leave her previous publisher Houghton Mifflin to join Alfred A.

[11] As she was still under contract for her novels, the Knopfs suggested publishing a collection of her short stories, Youth and the Bright Medusa, in 1920.

In the 1920s, Knopf sometimes withdrew or censored their books when threatened by John Sumner, such as Floyd Dell's Janet March or George Egerton's 1899 translation of Hunger.

William A. Koshland joined the company in 1934, and worked with the firm for more than fifty years, rising to take the positions of president and chairman of the board.

Following the Good Neighbor policy, Blanche Knopf visited South America in 1942, so the firm could start producing texts from there.

[17] Jones, who had discovered Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl while working at Doubleday, acquired Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking for Knopf.

[18] Jones would remain with Knopf, retiring in 2011 as a senior editor and vice-president after a career that included working with John Updike and Anne Tyler.

[22] Since its founding, Knopf has paid close attention to design and typography,[23] employing notable designers and typographers including William Addison Dwiggins, Harry Ford, Steven Heller, Chip Kidd, Lorraine Louie, Peter Mendelsund, Bruce Rogers, Rudolf Ruzicka, and Beatrice Warde.

Knopf published textbooks until 1988, when Random House's schools and colleges division was sold to McGraw Hill.

[26] In October 2012, Bertelsmann entered into talks with rival conglomerate Pearson plc, over the possibility of combining their respective publishing companies, Random House and Penguin Group.

[28] At the time of the acquisition the combined companies controlled 25% of the book business, with more than 10,000 employees and 250 independent publishing imprints and with about $3.9 billion in annual revenues.

[29] Other influential editors at Knopf included Harold Strauss (Japanese literature), Herbert Weinstock (biography of musical composers), Judith Jones (translations, The Diary of Anne Frank, culinary texts), Peter Mendelsund (art director and book cover designer)[30] as well as Bobbie Bristol, Angus Cameron, Ann Close, Charles Elliott, Gary Fisketjon, Lee Goerner, Ashbel Green, Carol Brown Janeway, Michael Magzis, Anne McCormick, Nancy Nicholas, Daniel Okrent, Regina Ryan, Sophie Wilkins, and Victoria Wilson.

[31] Alfred A. Knopf has published books by many notable authors, including John Banville, Carl Bernstein, Elizabeth Bowen, Frederick Buechner, Albert Camus, Robert Caro, Willa Cather, John Cheever, Julia Child, Bill Clinton, Michael Crichton, Miguel Covarrubias, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Bret Easton Ellis, James Ellroy, Martin Gardner, Kahlil Gibran, Lee H. Hamilton, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Keegan, Nella Larsen, John le Carré, Jack London, Gabriel García Márquez, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Cynthia Ozick, Christopher Paolini, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Anne Rice, Dorothy Richardson, Stephen M. Silverman, Oswald Spengler, Susan Swan, Donna Tartt, Barbara W. Tuchman, Anne Tyler, John Updike, Andrew Vachss, James D. Watson, and Elinor Wylie.