Robert Giroux
Encyclopedia
Robert Giroux 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
..
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.
, 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 trying to find a publisher for his second book of poems. Impressed by Lowell's manuscript, Giroux published the collection Lord Weary's Castle
immediately, and it went on to win the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
. In a PBS documentary on Lowell, Giroux states that it was the most successful book of poems that he ever published.
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 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 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," rejecting the manuscript. 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 Prize
s 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.
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.
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'Connor Sloane 3rd 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.http://www.riag.es/Titulos/G.html
, 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." .
Harcourt Trade Publishers
Harcourt was a United States publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. The company was based in San Diego, California, with an Editorial / Sales / Marketing / Rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida.In 2007, the U.S...
, he was hired away to work for Roger W. Straus, Jr.
Roger W. Straus, Jr.
Roger Williams Straus, Jr. was co-founder and chairman of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a New York book publishing company, and member of the Guggenheim family.-Early life:...
at Farrar & Straus
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus, Jr. and John C. Farrar. Known primarily as Farrar, Straus in its first decade of existence, the company was renamed several times, including Farrar, Straus and Young and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
in 1955, where he became a partner and, eventually, its chairman. The firm was henceforth known as Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus, Jr. and John C. Farrar. Known primarily as Farrar, Straus in its first decade of existence, the company was renamed several times, including Farrar, Straus and Young and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
, 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
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
and Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, and published the first books of Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...
, Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970....
, Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford...
, William Gaddis
William Gaddis
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. was an American novelist. He wrote five novels, two of which won National Book Awards and one of which, The Recognitions , was chosen as one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005...
, Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
, Larry Woiwode
Larry Woiwode
Larry Alfred Woiwode is an American writer who lives in North Dakota, where he has been the state's Poet Laureate since 1995. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Gentleman's Quarterly, The Partisan Review and The Paris Review...
and Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a role which now holds the title of US Poet Laureate.-Life:Jarrell was a native of Nashville, Tennessee...
and edited no fewer than seven Nobel laureates, Eliot, Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer – July 24, 1991) was a Polish Jewish American author noted for his short stories. He was one of the leading figures in the Yiddish literary movement, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978...
, Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...
, Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer and political activist. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature when she was recognised as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".Her writing has long dealt...
, Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
, William Golding
William Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, best known for his novel Lord of the Flies...
and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In a 1980 profile in the New York Times Book Review, poet Donald Hall
Donald Hall
Donald Hall is an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2006.-Personal life:...
wrote, "He is the only living editor whose name is bracketed with that of Maxwell Perkins
Maxwell Perkins
William Maxwell Evarts Perkins , was the editor for Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. He has been described as the most famous literary editor.-Career:...
," the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
and Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
..
Early life and education
The youngest of five children, Giroux was born in Jersey City, New JerseyJersey City, New Jersey
Jersey City is the seat of Hudson County, New Jersey, United States.Part of the New York metropolitan area, Jersey City lies between the Hudson River and Upper New York Bay across from Lower Manhattan and the Hackensack River and Newark Bay...
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
West Side, Jersey City
The West Side of Jersey City is a made of several diverse neighborhoods on either side of West Side Avenue, one of the city's main shopping streets...
of Jersey City . Both sisters left high school to work so that Giroux could pursue a higher education.
He attended Regis High School
Regis High School (New York City)
Regis High School is a private Jesuit university-preparatory school for academically gifted Roman Catholic young men located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Annual class enrollment is limited to approximately 135 male students from the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tri-state area...
, across the Hudson River in Manhattan, but dropped out during the Depression, to take a job with local newspaper, the Jersey Journal
Jersey Journal
The Jersey Journal is a newspaper published from Monday through Saturday, covering news and events throughout Hudson County, New Jersey. The headquarters in Jersey City are at Journal Square which was named after the newspaper...
(He eventually received his diploma 57 years later, in 1988.). Giroux received a scholarship
Scholarship
A scholarship is an award of financial aid for a student to further education. Scholarships are awarded on various criteria usually reflecting the values and purposes of the donor or founder of the award.-Types:...
to attend Columbia College of Columbia University
Columbia College of Columbia University
Columbia College is the oldest undergraduate college at Columbia University, situated on the university's main campus in Morningside Heights in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1754 by the Church of England as King's College, receiving a Royal Charter from King George II...
, intending to study journalism. Soon, though, he found himself drawn towards literature. His main classroom mentors were the poet and critic Mark Van Doren
Mark Van Doren
Mark Van Doren was an American poet, writer and a critic, apart from being a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, and Beat Generation...
and Raymond Weaver, the first biographer of Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
, who had discovered the novella, Billy Budd
Billy Budd
Billy Budd is a short novel by Herman Melville.Billy Budd can also refer to:*Billy Budd , a 1962 film produced, directed, and co-written by Peter Ustinov, based on Melville's novel...
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
John Berryman
John Allyn Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry...
, Herman Wouk
Herman Wouk
Herman Wouk is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author of novels including The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance.-Biography:...
, Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. was a 20th century Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion...
, Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...
, and John Latouche. In addition to writing film reviews for The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
, Giroux became president of the Philolexian Society
Philolexian Society
The Philolexian Society of Columbia University is one of the oldest college literary societies in the United States, and the oldest student group at Columbia...
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
Kellett Fellowship
The Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship is a prestigious prize awarded to two graduating seniors a year at Columbia College, the main undergraduate school of Columbia University...
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 relationsPublic relations
Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....
, here after working for four years, he found his first editing job as a junior editor, at Harcourt, Brace & Company
Harcourt (publisher)
Harcourt was a United States publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. The company was based in San Diego, California, with an Editorial / Sales / Marketing / Rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida.In 2007, the U.S...
in 1940. Here amongst his first works was Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...
's work on 19th-century socialist thinkers, To the Finland Station
To the Finland Station
To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History is a book by American critic and historian Edmund Wilson. The work presents the history of revolutionary thought and the birth of socialism, from the French Revolution through the collaboration of Marx and Engels to the arrival...
(1940), which was to become a classic .
During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
Giroux enlisted in the US Navy
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
in 1942, and served aboard the USS Essex
USS Essex (CV-9)
USS Essex was an aircraft carrier, the lead ship of the 24-ship built for the United States Navy during World War II. She was the fourth US Navy ship to bear the name. Commissioned in December 1942, Essex participated in several campaigns in the Pacific Theater of Operations, earning the...
in air combat intelligence as an intelligence officer
Intelligence officer
An intelligence officer is a person employed by an organization to collect, compile and/or analyze information which is of use to that organization...
, until 1945, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander
Lieutenant Commander
Lieutenant Commander is a commissioned officer rank in many navies. The rank is superior to a lieutenant and subordinate to a 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
Frank Morley
Frank Morley was a leading mathematician, known mostly for his teaching and research in the fields of algebra and geometry...
, a former director of Faber & Faber. He published many novels rejected by other publishers, such as Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford...
's The Natural
The Natural
The Natural is a 1952 novel about baseball written by Bernard Malamud. The book follows Roy Hobbs, a baseball prodigy whose career is sidetracked when he is shot by a woman who seeks to kill arrogant athletes to "better the world"...
(1952), Kerouac's The Town and the City
The Town and the City
The Town and the City is a novel by Jack Kerouac, published by Harcourt Brace in 1950. This was the first major work published by Kerouac, who later became famous for his second novel On the Road . Like all of Jack Kerouac's major works, The Town and the City is essentially an autobiographical...
(1950) and O'Connor's Wise Blood
Wise Blood
Wise Blood is the first novel by American author Flannery O'Connor, published in 1952. The novel was assembled from several disparate stories first published in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review...
(1952), and also worked on Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. was a 20th century Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion...
, the Trappist monk's famous autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain
The Seven Storey Mountain
The Seven Storey Mountain is the 1948 autobiography of Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk and a noted author of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Merton finished the book in 1946 at the age of 31, five years after entering the Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky...
(1948).
Soon he became adept to finding new authors, and one of his first finds was the novelist and short-story writer Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970....
, who in turn introduced him to her husband, Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
, who was trying to find a publisher for his second book of poems. Impressed by Lowell's manuscript, Giroux published the collection Lord Weary's Castle
Lord Weary's Castle
Lord Weary's Castle, Robert Lowell's second book of poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 when Lowell was only thirty. Robert Giroux, who was the publisher of Lowell's wife at the time, Jean Stafford, also became Lowell's publisher after he saw the manuscript for Lord Weary's Castle and...
immediately, and it went on to win the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry has been presented since 1922 for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. However, special citations for poetry were presented in 1918 and 1919.-Winners:...
. In a PBS documentary on Lowell, Giroux states that it was the most successful book of poems that he ever published.
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
Eugene Reynal
Eugene Reynal was an American Publisher and in 1933 Founder of Blue Ribbon Books of Garden City, New York and Reynal and Hitchcock of New York, New York....
, an Ivy League
Ivy League
The Ivy League is an athletic conference comprising eight private institutions of higher education in the Northeastern United States. The conference name is also commonly used to refer to those eight schools as a group...
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
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.-Early life:...
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
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact...
's first book in English, The Origins of Totalitarianism
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The Origins of Totalitarianism is a book by Hannah Arendt which describes and analyzes the two major totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism...
. 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
Alfred Harcourt
Alfred Harcourt was an American Publisher, Compiler and Founder of Harcourt, Brace & Howe in 1919....
and Donald Brace
Donald Brace
Donald Clifford Brace was an American Publisher and Founder of Harcourt, Brace & Howe in 1919....
died, and Giroux decided to move. Also in same interview, he revealed how as a young editor at Harcourt, Brace & Co., he won the opportunity to publish The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, it has since become popular with adolescent readers for its themes of teenage confusion, angst, alienation, language, and rebellion. It has been translated into almost all of the world's major...
, the 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger, but lost it, after the textbook department, noted "Not for us," rejecting the manuscript. 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
John Farrar
John Farrar is a music producer, songwriter, music arranger, singer and guitarist who is best known for his work with Olivia Newton-John with whom he wrote and produced many hit songs....
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
The Magic Barrel
The Magic Barrel is a collection of thirteen short stories written by Bernard Malamud and published in 1958. It won the 1959 National Book Award for fiction.The stories included are :*"The First Seven Years"*"The Mourners"*"The Girl of My Dreams"...
became FSG’s first National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
winner. Farrar, Straus & Company made him a partner in 1964, thus giving the company its new name, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus, Jr. and John C. Farrar. Known primarily as Farrar, Straus in its first decade of existence, the company was renamed several times, including Farrar, Straus and Young and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
(FSG), and Robert Lowell's book of poems, For the Union Dead
For the Union Dead
For the Union Dead is a book of poems by Robert Lowell that was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1964. It was Lowell's sixth book.Notable poems from the collection include "Beyond the Alps'" , "Water," "The Old Flame," "The Public Garden" and the title poem, which is one of Lowell's...
(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
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, John Berryman
John Berryman
John Allyn Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry...
, Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970....
, Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford...
, Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. was a 20th century Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion...
, Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...
, Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer – July 24, 1991) was a Polish Jewish American author noted for his short stories. He was one of the leading figures in the Yiddish literary movement, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978...
, Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...
, Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia...
, Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim...
, Walker Percy
Walker Percy
Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...
, Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston , co-founder of Fiction Donald...
, Grace Paley
Grace Paley
Grace Paley was an American-Jewish short story writer, poet, and political activist.-Biography:Grace Paley was born in the Bronx to Isaac and Manya Ridnyik Goodside, who anglicized the family name from Gutseit on immigrating from Ukraine. Her father was a doctor. The family spoke Russian and...
, Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...
and William Golding
William Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, best known for his novel Lord of the Flies...
. By 2000 FSG books had 29 literary awards, as well as a dozen the Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
s and 20 Nobel Prize for Literature .
Giroux worked with Kerouac on his first novel, The Town and the City
The Town and the City
The Town and the City is a novel by Jack Kerouac, published by Harcourt Brace in 1950. This was the first major work published by Kerouac, who later became famous for his second novel On the Road . Like all of Jack Kerouac's major works, The Town and the City is essentially an autobiographical...
(it was dedicated to him) and on the manuscript for his Beat
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
classic On the Road
On the Road
On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of...
. 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
William Desmond Taylor
William Desmond Taylor was an Irish-born American actor, successful film director of silent movies and a popular figure in the growing Hollywood film colony of the 1910s and early 1920s...
.
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
National Board of Review of Motion Pictures
The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures was founded in 1909 in New York City, just 13 years after the birth of cinema, to protest New York City Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr.'s revocation of moving-picture exhibition licenses on Christmas Eve 1908. The mayor believed that the new medium...
, an organization that fights movie censorship.
Awards and honors
Among the accolades Giroux received were an honorary doctorate from Seton Hall UniversitySeton Hall University
Seton Hall University is a private Roman Catholic university in South Orange, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1856 by Archbishop James Roosevelt Bayley, Seton Hall is the oldest diocesan university in the United States. Seton Hall is also the oldest and largest Catholic university in the...
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
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
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
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
. He was awarded a Special Citation at the National Board of Review Awards 1989
National Board of Review Awards 1989
The 61st National Board of Review Awards, honoring the best in filmmaking in 1989, were announced on 13 December 1990 and given on 26 February 1990.-Top 10 films:#Driving Miss Daisy *Academy Award for Best Picture*#Henry V#Sex, Lies, and Videotape...
. 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
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine, who accepted the prize on his behalf.
Marriage
In 1952, Giroux married Doña Carmen Natica de Arango y del Valle (common name: Carmen de Arango) (died 1999),http://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2004/06/28/pdfs/A23789-23789.pdf an advisor to the Holy SeeHoly See
The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, in which its Bishop is commonly known as the Pope. It is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and...
Missions
Diplomatic missions of the Holy See
This is a list of diplomatic missions of the Holy See. Since the fifth century, long before the founding of the Vatican City State in 1929, papal envoys have represented the Holy See to foreign potentates...
Delegation to the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
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'Connor Sloane 3rd 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.http://www.riag.es/Titulos/G.html
Death
Giroux died on September 5, 2008 at Seabrook Village, an independent-living center, in Tinton Falls, New JerseyNew Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
, aged 94.
At his well-attended subsequent memorial at Columbia University’s St. Paul’s Chapel
St. Paul's Chapel (Columbia University)
St. Paul's Chapel is the chapel of Columbia University in New York City. Designed and built from 1904 to 1907 by I. N. Phelps Stokes of the architectural firm Howells & Stokes in an elaborate mixture of Italian Renaissance, Byzantine, and Gothic styles, its interior features Guastavino tile...
, Paul Elie
Paul Elie
Paul Elie is an American writer and editor.His book The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction Winners in 2004, and received National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. Since 1993 he has been an editor at Farrar,...
, 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." .