Robert Giroux

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Robert Giroux
BA)
OccupationChairman Farrar, Straus and Giroux
SpouseCarmen de Arango (1952–1969) (divorced)

Robert Giroux (April 8, 1914 – September 5, 2008) was an American

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".[1]

In his career stretching over five decades, he edited some of the most important voices of the 20th century, including

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.[2][3][4]

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.[5] 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.[6] His sisters Josephine and Estelle both left high school to work and contribute money so that Bob could continue his education. He has three nieces, Maclovia, Kathleen and Roberta, whom he was close to throughout his life.

He attended

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.[4][5]

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.[7]

After leaving the navy, he took his article about the rescue of a fighter pilot downed at the

Collier's and was later widely anthologized.[5]
He published an article about the "Capture at Truk" which made the cover of Life magazine.

In 1948, Giroux 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 publishing houses, such as Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952), Kerouac's The Town and the City (1950) and O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952). He also worked on Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). Soon he became adept at 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.[12]

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".[13]

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

T.S. Eliot.[8]

After

Roger Straus, as editor-in-chief. Almost twenty of his writers at Harcourt eventually followed him, including Eliot, Lowell, O'Connor, and Malamud.[10] In 1959, Malamud's The Magic Barrel became FSG's first National Book Award winner. Farrar, Straus & Company made him a partner in 1964, giving the company its new name, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG). Robert Lowell's book of poems, For the Union Dead (1964) was the first book to bear his imprint.[15]
He became company's chairman in 1973.

Among the writers Giroux discovered or developed at FSG were

Nobel Prizes.[7]

Giroux worked with

Kerouac on his first novel, The Town and the City, and on the manuscript for his Beat classic On the Road
. The former was dedicated to him. In a documentary interview, Giroux recalled 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: "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 as The Freedom of the Poet (1976), Collected Prose of Robert Lowell (1987), and Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop (1984), whose letters he later edited, as One Art (1994). He also authored 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.[8]

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".[8]

From 1975 to 1982, he was president of the

National Board of Review of Motion Pictures
, an organization that fights movie censorship.

Awards and honors

Giroux received an honorary doctorate from Seton Hall University in 1999,[16] from Saint Peter's College/University in 2001,[17] the Mayoral Award of Honor for Art and Culture from the City of New York in 1989,[18] and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters from New York University in 1988.[19]

He also received the Alexander Hamilton Medal, the Columbia College Alumni Association's highest honor, in 1987, the same year he received 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),[1] an advisor to the

Missions Delegation to the United Nations[20] 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.[2]



Death

Giroux died on September 5, 2008, at Seabrook Village, an independent-living center, in

Tinton Falls, New Jersey, aged 94.[5] At his 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."[10]

Notes

  1. ^ Arts, Jersey City, People » Remembering Robert Giroux, Jersey City's literary lion by Jason Fink. September 11, 2008.
  2. ^ "Robert Giroux". The Telegraph. September 7, 2008. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  3. Washington Post
    . Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  4. ^
    New York Observer. September 5, 2008. Archived from the original
    on September 7, 2008. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  5. ^
    New York Times
    . Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  6. ^ Di Ionno, Mark (September 11, 2008). "In Jersey City, this literary lion was just their Bob". NJ.com. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  7. ^ a b c d "Robert Giroux: influential American publisher and editor". The Times. London. September 8, 2008.
  8. ^ a b c d e Carlson, Michael (September 26, 2008). "Robert Giroux: America's pre-eminent editor, he fostered Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag and Robert Lowell". The Guardian. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  9. New York Times
    . Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  10. ^ a b c Boris Kachka (December 28, 2008). "Courtly Lion: Robert Giroux's life reminds us that great publishing needs quiet rebels (and taste)". New York.
  11. ISBN 978-0312-35003-1
    .
  12. ^ Voices and Visions Video Series. Robert Lowell. 1988.
  13. ^ a b "Robert Giroux: The Art of Publishing No. 3". The Paris Review. Summer 2000.
  14. New York Times
    . September 6, 2008.
  15. ^ Nichols, Michelle (September 5, 2008). "Partner in U.S. publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux dies". Reuters. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  16. New York Times
    11/7/1999
  17. ^ Honorary Degree Recipients
  18. New York Times
    6/28/1989
  19. New York Times
    11/15/1988
  20. New York Times
    . March 23, 1999.

External links

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