Publisher Robert Giroux: the gold standard of literary taste

NEW YORK — Robert Giroux, an editor who introduced and nurtured some of the major authors of the 20th century and who rose to join one of the nation's most distinguished publishing houses as a partner, making it Farrar, Straus & Giroux, died Friday in Tinton Falls, N.J. He was 94.

He died in his sleep at an independent-living facility, a niece, Kathleen Mulvehill, said.

If the flamboyant Roger Straus presented the public face of Farrar, Straus, Mr. Giroux, as editor-in-chief, was its quiet mover, working behind the scenes to shape its list of books and establishing himself as the gold standard of literary taste.

He was originally attracted to editing while at Columbia University, when he took an honors seminar with Raymond Weaver.

How many masterpieces Mr. Giroux discovered will be for the future to decide. As he insisted, it can take decades for a book to become a classic. Still, one of the first books he edited is on any list of the century's best, Edmund Wilson's work on 19th-century socialist thinkers, "To the Finland Station" (1940); Mr. Giroux judged the manuscript to be nearly flawless.

He was also T.S. Eliot's U.S. editor and published the U.S. edition of George Orwell's "1984."

Mr. Giroux introduced a long roster of writers who would achieve fame, publishing first books by, among others, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, 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, Louise Bogan and William Golding.

In one episode he persuaded William Saroyan to transform "The Human Comedy" (1943) from a film script into a novel by suggesting that he simply remove the camera directions from the manuscript. The novel sold well and became a book-club selection.

To his lasting chagrin, Mr. Giroux also saw two major works slip from his grasp, J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" and Kerouac's "On the Road."

Despite being a high-school dropout, he won a scholarship to Columbia and set out to study journalism. But he was soon won over to literature by classes with Weaver and the poet and critic Mark Van Doren, and he joined the campus literary journal The Columbia Review.

He was a Navy intelligence officer during World War II, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander, partly, he said, because his hair had been white since his youth.

In 1952, he married Carmen de Arango; the marriage ended in divorce in 1969. In addition to Mulvehill, he is survived by two other nieces.

After leaving the Navy, Mr. Giroux took an article he had written to a Navy public-information office in New York and met Lt. (jg) Roger Straus Jr. Straus said he liked the article and would place it where it would get the widest circulation. "Rescue at Truk" ran in Colliers magazine and was widely anthologized.

Mr. Giroux, who had worked at Harcourt, Brace before joining the Navy, returned to the publisher and became executive editor in 1948.

But he became fed up after, among other things, being forced to reject "Catcher in the Rye," and in 1955, joined Farrar, Straus as editor-in-chief. Some 17 of his writers at Harcourt followed him.

Farrar, Straus — founded in 1946 by Straus and John Farrar — made him a partner in 1964.

Straus and Giroux thrived together even as they endlessly complained about each other, with Straus regarding Giroux as a snob, and Giroux looking upon Straus as more a businessman than a man of letters.

Mr. Giroux wrote several books, including "The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets" and "A Deed of Death: The Story behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor." He also edited the collected prose of Bishop and Lowell and the letters of Bishop, and the complete stories of Malamud.

Information from The Associated Press

is included in this report.