Editor and publisher Robert Giroux died in his sleep on 5 September 2008. Born 8 April 1914 in Jersey City, New Jersey, he’ll be remembered as the third partner of the firm Farrar, Straus (which was renamed Farrar, Straus, & Giroux).
Giroux edited some of the biggest names in American—indeed, world—literature, including Donald Barthelme, Carl Sandburg, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Virignia Woolf. He bought the first book by such writers as Jack Kerouac, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, and Susan Sontag. He was also T.S. Eliot’s American editor, and published the US edition of George Orwell’s classic 1984. But he wasn’t infallible. He passed on J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Kerouac’s On the Road.
He dropped out of New York City’s Regis High School a few months before he was to graduate in 1931, in order to take a newspaper job at The Jersey Journal. “It was the Depression, and jobs were hard to find. If I didn’t take that one in April, I wouldn’t have gotten it at all.” He described the situation in a 1988 The New York Times interview, upon the occasion of his receipt of his high school diploma. He soon won a scholarship to Columbia, where he edited The Columbia Review. He got his first editing job at Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1940.
He served in the US Navy during World War II, as an intelligence officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Essex. After the war, he wrote an article about his experiences, and met up with a Navy public information officer, Lieutenant J.G. Roger W. Straus Jr., who sold the piece, “Rescue at Truk,” to Colliers magazine for $1,000. Giroux rejoined Harcourt, and became executive editor in 1948. Disagreements with his bosses led to his departure in 1955, when he joined the nine-year-old Farrar, Straus & Company as editor in chief. He became a partner in 1964, and later the company’s chairman. Farrar died in 1974, Straus in 2004.
Giroux wrote several of his own books, including The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1982) and A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor (1990).
Giroux’s only marriage, to Carmen de Arango in 1952, ended in divorce in 1969. He is survived by three nieces.