November/December 2008
Obituaries
Robert Giroux ’36, Publisher and Editor
Robert Giroux ’36, publisher, editor and chairman of the distinguished publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, died on September 5, 2008, in Tinton Falls, N.J. He was 94.
Robert Giroux ’36 in the 1980s. Photo: Arthur W. WangBorn on April 8, 1914, in Jersey City, Giroux was the youngest of five children. His father was a silk mill foreman and his mother a grade-school teacher. Giroux attended the prestigious Jesuit academy Regis H.S. but dropped out in 1931 in order to take a newspaper job with The Jersey Journal. High school aside, he was awarded a scholarship to Columbia and matriculated with plans to study journalism. Soon Giroux was immersed in the classes of Mark Van Doren, Raymond Weaver and Jacques Barzun ’27, and he left journalism to pursue literature. Giroux befriended John Berryman ’36, later a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and the two revived The Philolexian Society. It was at Columbia that Giroux was introduced to editing, becoming editor-in-chief of The Columbia Review, where he published Berryman’s first poems and the early writings of Thomas Merton ’38.
After graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English and comparative literature, Giroux took a job in the public relations department at CBS because publishing jobs were scarce at that time. In 1940, he took his first editorial job, at Harcourt, Brace & Co. Giroux’s career was interrupted for three years during WWII when he served as an intelligence officer in the Navy. In 1945, after leaving the Navy, Giroux rejoined Harcourt, Brace as editor-in-chief.
While there, he edited Jack Kerouac ’44’s first book, The Town and the City, only to pass over On the Road, much to his later regret. According to The New York Times, Kerouac approached Giroux with a manuscript written on onionskin and teletype paper in a pasted, 120-foot long roll. Kerouac demanded that the manuscript be accepted without any changes, and Giroux declined. He also passed on J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, but had enormous success with many legendary authors, including Flannery O’Connor, Jean Stafford, Donald Barthelme, Robert Lowell, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, among others.
Upon the death of Giroux’s mentor, Donald Brace, Giroux felt that Harcourt, Brace was moving in the wrong direction, turning toward more commercial books and fewer classics, and so he joined Farrar, Straus & Co. in 1955 as editor-in-chief. Many of the authors with whom Giroux worked at Harcourt, Brace followed him. Giroux had first encountered Roger W. Straus Jr. at a Navy public information office in New York, approaching him with a piece he had written on the Battle of Truk Lagoon in the Pacific. Founded in 1946 by Straus and John C. Farrar, the company was renamed Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1964 when Giroux was made a partner. He became chairman of the editorial board in 1973.
Giroux wrote several books, including The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1982) and A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor (1990). He also wrote numerous essays, including memoirs of E.M. Forster and Berryman for the Yale Review. Giroux began a memoir but never finished it. According to the Times, Giroux approached T.S. Eliot in 1946 and asked him if he believed it was true that most editors are failed writers. “Perhaps,” Eliot replied, “but so are most writers.”
Giroux was president of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, an organization opposed to movie censorship, from 1975–82. In 1987, he was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Medal, the College’s highest honor. He also received the New York Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture.
Giroux married Carmen de Arango in 1952, and they were divorced in 1969. The couple did not have children. Giroux is survived by three nieces.
Gordon Chenoweth Sauer ’11 Arts