George Palmer Putnam, 1814–72, American publisher, b. Brunswick, Maine; grandnephew of Israel Putnam. A member of the New York City bookselling firm of Wiley and Putnam, he established a branch in London in 1841. He later returned to New York to found (1848) G. P. Putnam's Sons. He was proprietor of Putnam's Magazine (1853–57), which was revived for brief periods in 1868–71 and 1906–10. One of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was its honorary secretary. George Haven Putnam and Herbert Putnam were his sons, and Mary Putnam Jacobi, a physician, was his daughter.

See the memoir by his son G. H. Putnam (1912).

George Palmer Putnam, 1887–1950, American author and explorer, b. Rye, N.Y.; grandson of G. P. Putnam, founder of the publishing firm. He led two expeditions to the Arctic—one in 1926, under the sponsorship of the American Museum of Natural History, up the west coast of Greenland and the other in 1927 to Baffin Island to collect specimens of wildlife. He married Amelia Earhart in 1931, and after she was lost at sea in 1937 he wrote her biography, Soaring Wings (1939). His autobiography, Wide Margins, appeared in 1942.