Robert Giroux (April 8, 1914 — September 5, 2008) was an influential American book editor and publisher. Starting his editing career with Harcourt, Brace & Co., he was hired away to work for Roger W. Straus, Jr. at Farrar & Straus in 1955, where he became a partner and, eventually, its chairman. The firm was henceforth known as Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where was known by his nickname, "Bob" .
In his career stretching over five decades, he edited some of important voices in 20th century fiction including, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf, and published the first books of Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Stafford, Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Susan Sontag, Larry Woiwode and Randall Jarrell and edited no fewer than seven Nobel laureates, Eliot, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, William Golding and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In a 1980 profile in the New York Times Book Review, poet Donald Hall wrote, "He is the only living editor whose name is bracketed with that of Maxwell Perkins," the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway..
The youngest of five children, Giroux was born in Jersey City, New Jersey to Arthur J. Giroux, a foreman for a silk manufacturer, and Katharine Lyons Giroux, a grade-school teacher.. Robert Giroux was one of five children: Arnold, Lester, Estele, Josephine and Robert, and grew up in the old Irish-Catholic West side of Jersey City . Both sisters left high school to work so that Giroux could pursue a higher education.
He attended Regis High School, across the Hudson River in Manhattan, but dropped out during the Depression, to take a job with local newspaper, the Jersey Journal (He eventually received his diploma 57 years later, in 1988.). Giroux received a scholarship to attend Columbia College of Columbia University, intending to study journalism. Soon, though, he found himself drawn towards literature. His main classroom mentors were the poet and critic Mark Van Doren and Raymond Weaver, the first biographer of Herman Melville, who had discovered the novella, Billy Budd in manuscript form in 1924. "Imagine discovering a masterpiece..., as he later noted, "a great book is often ahead of its time, and the trick is how to keep it afloat until the times catch up with it" . At Columbia, too, Giroux met a number of contemporaries who were destined for greatness in arts and letters, among them his classmate John Berryman, Herman Wouk, Thomas Merton, Ad Reinhardt, and John Latouche. In addition to writing film reviews for The Nation, Giroux became president of the Philolexian Society and editor of the literary magazine The Columbia Review, wherein he published some Berryman’s and Merton's earliest works. Upon graduating in 1936, he declined Van Doren's offer of a Kellett Fellowship at Cambridge University; the fellowship went to Berryman instead.
Giroux started his career with a job with the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in public relations, here after working for four years, he found his first editing job as a junior editor, at Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1940. Here amongst his first works was Edmund Wilson's work on 19th-century socialist thinkers, To the Finland Station (1940), which was to become a classic .
During World War II Giroux enlisted in the US Navy in 1942, and served aboard the USS Essex in air combat intelligence as an intelligence officer, until 1945, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander .
After leaving the Navy, he took his article about the rescue of a fighter pilot downed at the Battle of Truk Lagoon in the Pacific, to a Navy public information 0ffice in New York, here officer in charge, Lt. Roger W. Straus Jr. suggested that he could get him $1,000 by selling it to a mass publication, hence "Rescue at Truk" ran in Collier's magazine and was later widely anthologized. He published an article about the "Capture at Turk" which made the cover of Life Magazine.
In 1948, he rejoined Harcourt, where he became executive editor, and worked the supervision of Frank Morley, a former director of Faber & Faber. He published many novels rejected by other publishers, such as Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952), Kerouac's The Town and the City (1950) and O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952), and also worked on Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk's famous autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). Soon he became adept to finding new authors, and one of his first finds was the novelist and short-story writer Jean Stafford, who in turn introduced him to her husband, Robert Lowell, who was then working in publishing that too rather unsuccessfully. Finding his poems superb, Giroux published the collection Lord Weary's Castle immediately, and it won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In the coming years, Giroux became an important support many writers, including Lowell, while he saw his wife Stafford institutionalised and later spent most of his later life battling depression. Lowell had also taken Giroux to meet poet Ezra Pound, who remained captive at St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, 1946 to 1958 after his nervous breakdown. Here, when Pound, known for his disdain for editors asked, "What in hell are you doing here?" Giroux's replied, "I've come to pay homage to a poet," This drew a bow from the poet .
Also in 1947 Morley left the company and return to London, a year later, Giroux was promoted to editor-in-chief, reporting to Eugene Reynal, an Ivy League scholar whom Brace had brought in to replace Morley, this development didn't turn out amicable for the two. As in an 2000 interview with George Plimpton in The Paris Review, he called Reynal tactless and a “terrible snob” .
From 1948 to 1955 Giroux continued to edit important works. By 1951, his reputation as America's foremost editor had attracted foreign writers, for example in 1951, he published Hannah Arendt's first book in English, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Indeed, of his seven Nobel prize winners, which included Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Yiddish writer, the St Lucia-born poet Derek Walcott, the English William Golding, Irish Seamus Heaney, South African writer, Nadine Gordimer and TS Eliot, only Eliot was American-born .
In the meantime, both Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace died, and Giroux decided to move. Also in same interview, he revealed how as a young editor while as an editor at Harcourt, Brace & Co., he won the opportunity to publish The Catcher in the Rye, the 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger, but lost it, after the textbook department, noted "Not for us" . He soon started looking around and in 1955 he joined Farrar, Straus & Company as editor-in-chief, run by his fellow Second World War veterans John Farrar and Roger Straus. Subsequently almost 20 of his writers at Harcourt eventually followed him, including TS Eliot, Lowell, O’Connor and Malamud . In 1959, Malamud’s The Magic Barrel became FSG’s first National Book Award winner. Farrar, Straus & Company made him a partner in 1964, thus giving the company its new name, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), and Robert Lowell's book of poems, For the Union Dead (1964) was the first book to bear his imprint.. Ultimately in 1973, he became company's chairman.
In the coming years, among the writers Giroux discovered or developed were Jack Kerouac, John Berryman, Jean Stafford, Bernard Malamud, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott and William Golding . By 2000 FSG books had 29 literary awards, as well as a dozen the Pulitzer Prizes and 20 Nobel Prize for Literature .
Giroux worked with Kerouac on his first novel, The Town and the City (it was dedicated to him) and on the manuscript for his Beat classic On the Road. In a documentary interview, Giroux recalls how he tried to explain to Kerouac that the novel, typed out on a huge, single roll of paper, needed to be worked on, to which Kerouac replied solemnly: "There shall be no editing of this manuscript, this manuscript was dictated by the Holy Ghost."
Among the notable works he published as an editor were a collection of Berryman’s critical prose in The Freedom of the Poet (1976), Collected Prose of Robert Lowell (1987), Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop (1984), whose letters he later edited, as One Art (1994). He also authored books such as, The Education of an Editor, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1982) and A Deed of Death (1990), an investigation of the 1922 murder of the Hollywood director, William Desmond Taylor . His relationship with Straus was often strained: Giroux, more the literary man, was often at odds with Straus, who was primarily a businessman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux never published his 25th anniversary anthology, which he also edited, as Straus took offense to his portrayal in Giroux's introduction. Nonetheless, Giroux did not complete his memoirs because he said he did not want to write negatively about Straus. For his part, Straus counted Giroux's entry in his company as the significant event in its history. In another famous anecdote between Giroux and Eliot, once Giroux suggested to Eliot that editors were mostly failed writers, to which Eliot, "so are most writers"..
From 1975 to 1982, he was president of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, an organization that fights movie censorship.
Among the accolades Giroux received were an honorary doctorate from Seton Hall University in 1999, the Mayoral Award of Honor for Art and Culture from the City of New York in 1989 , and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters from New York University in 1988 .
He also received the Alexander Hamilton Medal, the Columbia College Alumni Association's highest honor, in 1987, the same year he received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was awarded a Special Citation at the National Board of Review Awards 1989. In 2006, he was presented with the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement; though unable to receive the award in person, he conveyed his thanks through Alice Quinn, the poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine, who accepted the prize on his behalf.
In 1952, Giroux married Doņa Carmen Natica de Arango y del Valle (common name: Carmen de Arango) (died 1999),[1] an advisor to the Holy See Missions Delegation to the United Nations they divorced in 1969. The couple had three children: Frank, Laura and Erika Pommett, and Roberts had three nieces, Maclovia, Katherine and Roberta.
Doņa Carmen de Arango was the younger daughter of Cuban aristocrat Don Francisco de Arango, 3rd Marquis de la Gratitud, and his wife, the former Doņa Petronilla del Valle, and she had been previously engaged to Thomas O'Connor Sloane 3rd and Don Julio Lafitte, Count de Lugar Nuevo. After the death of her sister, Doņa Mercedes, the 4th Marquise in 1998, Doņa Carmen de Arango Giroux became the 5th Marquise de la Gratitud.[2]
Giroux died on September 5, 2008 at Seabrook Village, an independent-living center, in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, aged 94.At his well-attended subsequent memorial at Columbia University’s St. Paul’s Chapel, Paul Elie, another editor said, "It is tempting to float an analogy between his death and the death of a certain kind of publishing. But the fact is that his kind of publishing was rare in his own time, and so was he." .
