Robert Giroux, Editor, Publisher and Nurturer of Literary Giants, Is Dead at 94

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: NY Times, September 6, 2008

Robert Giroux, an editor and publisher who introduced and nurtured some of the major authors of the 20th century and ultimately added his name to one of the nation’s most distinguished publishing houses, died on Friday in Tinton Falls, N.J. He was 94.

Arthur W. Wang photo of Robert Giroux in the 1980s.

He died in his sleep at Seabrook Village, an independent-living center, a niece, Kathleen Mulvehill, said.
If the flamboyant Roger Straus presented the public face of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, presiding over the business end, Mr. Giroux made his mark on the inside, as editor in chief, shaping the house’s book list and establishing himself as the gold standard of literary taste. The publisher Charles Scribner Jr., in his memoir, “In the Company of Writers” (1991), wrote, “Giroux is a great man of letters, a great editor and a great publisher.”
Mr. Giroux was T. S. Eliot’s American editor and published the American edition of George Orwell’s “1984,” accepting it despite the objection of his immediate superior, whose wife had found some of the novel’s passages distasteful.
He introduced a long roster of illustrious writers, publishing first books by, among others, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. He edited Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott and William Golding.

Read the full piece at the NYT online.