CliffsNotes was started by
Nebraska native
Clifton Hillegass in 1958. He was working at
Nebraska Book Company of Lincoln, Nebraska, when he met Jack Cole, the co-owner of
Coles, a Toronto book business. Coles published a series of Canadian study guides called
Coles Notes, and sold Hillegass the U.S. rights to the guides. Hillegass and his wife, Catherine, started the business in their basement at 511 Eastridge Drive in Lincoln, with sixteen
William Shakespeare titles. In August 1958, they shipped their first batch of notes and by the end of that year had sold over 58,000 copies. Hillegass hired literature teachers to condense works of literature into concise summaries, commentaries, author biographies and character analyses. In the 1960s, as his own writers revised the summaries of Shakespearian plays, Hillegass eliminated the Coles Notes versions. In 2012, CliffsNotes was acquired by
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In 2021, CliffsNotes was acquired by
Course Hero. == See also ==