Robert Giroux | |
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| Born | April 8, 1914 Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | September 5, 2008 (aged 94) Tinton Falls, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Education | Columbia University (BA) |
| Occupation | Chairman Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Spouse | Carmen de Arango (1952–1969) (divorced) |
Robert Giroux (April 8, 1914 – September 5, 2008) was an American book editor and publisher. Starting his editing career with Harcourt, Brace & Co., he was hired away to work for 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 T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Merton, and published the first books of Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Stafford, Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Susan Sontag, Larry Woiwode and Randall Jarrell and edited no fewer than seven Nobel laureates: Eliot, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, William Golding and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In a 1980 profile in the 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]
- ^ Arts, Jersey City, People » Remembering Robert Giroux, Jersey City's literary lion by Jason Fink. September 11, 2008.
- ^ "Robert Giroux". The Telegraph. September 7, 2008. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
- ^ Schudel, Matt (September 6, 2008). "Obituaries: Robert Giroux; Publishing Maverick Discovered and Edited Great Writers". Washington Post. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
- ^ "Robert Giroux, Who Published Gaddis, Malamud, and O'Connor Dies at 94". New York Observer. September 5, 2008. Archived from the original on September 7, 2008. Retrieved August 9, 2013.