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 Regis High School in Manhattan, but dropped out during the Depression, to take a job with local newspaper, the Jersey Journal.[5] (He eventually received his diploma 57 years later, in 1988.)[7][8] Giroux received a scholarship to attend Columbia College of Columbia University, intending to study journalism. Soon, though, he found himself drawn to literature. His main classroom mentors were the poet and critic Mark Van Doren and Raymond Weaver, the first biographer of Herman Melville, who had discovered the novella, Billy Budd in manuscript form in 1924. "Imagine discovering a masterpiece...,[7][8][9] as he later noted, "a great book is often ahead of its time, and the trick is how to keep it afloat until the times catch up with it".[10] At Columbia, too, Giroux met a number of contemporaries who were destined for greatness in arts and letters, among them his classmate John Berryman, Herman Wouk, Thomas Merton, Ad Reinhardt, and John Latouche.[11] In addition to writing film reviews for The Nation, Giroux became president of the Philolexian Society and editor of the literary magazine The Columbia Review, where he published some of Berryman's and Merton's earliest works. Upon graduating in 1936, he declined Van Doren's offer of a Kellett Fellowship at Cambridge University; the fellowship went to Berryman instead.
After leaving the navy, he took his article about the rescue of a fighter pilot downed at the Battle of Truk Lagoon in the Pacific to a Navy public information Office in New York, where the officer in charge, Lt. Roger W. Straus Jr., suggested that he could get him $1,000 by selling it to a mass publication. "Rescue at Truk" ran in 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]
After Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace died, Giroux decided to move. In the same Plimpton interview, he revealed how as a young editor at Harcourt, Brace & Co., he won the opportunity to publish The Catcher in the Rye, the 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger, but lost it after the textbook department noted "Not for us", rejecting the manuscript.[13][14] He soon started looking around and in 1955 he joined Farrar, Straus & Company, run by his fellow Second World War veterans John C. Farrar and 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.
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]
In 1952, Giroux married Doña Carmen Natica de Arango y del Valle (common name: Carmen de Arango) (died 1999),[1] an advisor to the Holy SeeMissions 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]
^Silverman, Al (2008). The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of American Publishers, Their Editors and Authors. New York: Truman Talley. ISBN978-0312-35003-1.
^Voices and Visions Video Series. Robert Lowell. 1988.
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