Roger Williams Straus Jr.
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Roger Williams Straus Jr. | |
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Gladys Guggenheim | |
Relatives | Oscar Straus (grandfather) Sarah Lavanburg Straus (grandmother) |
Roger Williams Straus Jr. (January 3, 1917 – May 25, 2004) was co-founder and chairman of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a New York book publishing company, and member of the Guggenheim family.
Biography
Early life
Straus was born in
While Straus Sr. focused on metal, Straus Jr. had his mind on paper. A summer job as copyboy and occasional writer for the White Plains Daily Reporter got him interested in journalism. He dropped out of
On June 27, 1938, Straus married childhood friend Dorothea Liebmann, great granddaughter of the founder of
Straus worked a variety of jobs after graduation. He was a reporter for the Columbia Missourian, publisher and editor of a literary magazine called Asterisk, and an editorial staff member of Current History magazine. He edited a series of history books for
With the onset of World War II, he joined the Navy but a spinal infection prevented him from seeing action. He was put to work in the Magazine and Book Section of the Navy Office of Public Relations in New York, with his friend James Van Alen. Lieutenant Straus was discharged in 1945.
Publisher
The New York Times editorial page editor Charles Merz, a friend of his father, introduced Straus to John C. Farrar of Farrar & Rinehart (1929–1946). Straus borrowed $30,000 against his inheritance, $70,000 from his Navy co-worker Van Alen, and another $50,000 from others including Julius Fleischmann, whose family was famous for yeast and gin. The two began the firm of Farrar Straus & Co. on November 21, 1945. It was located in the naval office where Straus had served. They earned $200,000 in sales in their first year. Their first blockbuster was Gayelord Hauser's Look Younger, Live Longer, which was published in 1950 and eventually sold 600,000 copies.
From 1948 to 1971, Farrar Straus acquired seven competitors including Hendricks House, Pellegrini & Cudahy, Noonday Press, and Hill & Wang. In 1950, stockholder
Straus was regarded as one of the last old-fashioned publishers, faithful to his company and tight with his money, but emphasizing quality over commercial success.[3] His dedication to the publishing business earned him several Nobel Prize-winning authors, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Czesław Miłosz and T. S. Eliot, and Pulitzer Prize authors such as Robert Lowell, John McPhee, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud. The FSG brand became so renowned that author Scott Turow turned down a $350,000 advance from a rival publisher for his first novel, Presumed Innocent, so that he could work with Straus, who offered him $200,000.
John McPhee speaking at Straus's memorial service said of him, "He was there in my thirties, forties, fifties and sixties, and was still leading me up the street on a leash when I entered my seventies."[2]
In 1994, twenty years after his partner Farrar had died, Straus ceded control of the company to a German publishing conglomerate,
References
- ^ Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (May 27, 2004). "Roger W. Straus Jr., Book Publisher From the Age of the Independents, Dies at 87". The New York Times. Retrieved 2017-04-14. Quote: "died Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital".
- ^ ISBN 978-0312-35003-1.
- ^ Attanasio, Paul (18 August 1981). "The gentleman publisher: Roger Straus and the blockbuster boom". The Boston Phoenix. Retrieved 13 April 2024.