Robert Giroux

Robert Giroux (April 8, 1914 – September 5, 2008) was an 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 he was known by his nickname, "Bob".

In his career stretching over five decades, he edited some of the most significant writers of the 20th century, including T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Merton, 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 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.

Early life and education 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. His sisters Josephine and Estelle both left high school to work and contribute money so that Bob could continue his education. He had three nieces, Maclovia, Kathleen and Roberta, whom he was close to throughout his life.

He attended Regis High School in Manhattan, but dropped out during the Depression, to take a job with local newspaper, the Jersey Journal. 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". 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, where he published some of 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.

Career Giroux started his career with a job with the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in public relations. After working there for four years, he found his first editing job as a junior editor, at Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1940. Among the first works he edited was Edmund Wilson's work on 19th-century socialist thinkers, To the Finland Station (1940), which was to become a classic.

In 1947, Frank Morley left the company and returned to London, and 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 did not turn out amicably for the two. In a 2000 interview with George Plimpton in The Paris Review, he called Reynal tactless and a "terrible snob". He soon started looking around and in 1955 he joined Farrar, Straus & Company, run by his fellow Second World War veterans John C. Farrar and Roger Straus, as editor-in-chief. Almost twenty of his writers at Harcourt eventually followed him, including Eliot, Lowell, O'Connor, and Malamud. He became company's chairman in 1973.

Among the writers Giroux discovered or developed at FSG 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.

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. 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 joining his company as the significant event in its history.

Once Giroux suggested to Eliot that editors were mostly failed writers, to which Eliot replied: "so are most writers". from Saint Peter's College/University in 2001, 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.

Marriage In 1952, Giroux married Doña Carmen Natica de Arango y del Valle (common name: Carmen de Arango) (died 1999), an advisor to the Holy See Missions Delegation to the United Nations they divorced in 1969. Doña Carmen de Arango was the younger daughter of Cuban aristocrat Don Francisco de Arango, 3rd Marquis de la Gratitud, and his wife, the former Doña Petronilla del Valle, and she had been previously engaged to Thomas O'Conor Sloane III and Don Julio Lafitte, Count de Lugar Nuevo. After the death of her sister, Doña Mercedes, the 4th Marquise in 1998, Doña Carmen de Arango Giroux became the 5th Marquise de la Gratitud.

Death Giroux died on September 5, 2008, at Seabrook Village, an independent-living center, in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, aged 94.