Robert Giroux, Who Published Gaddis, Malamud, and O'Connor Dies at 94
Robert Giroux, who discovered and edited some of the most unusual and paradigm-shifting voices in 20th century fiction, died today at his home in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, at the age of 94. Here's the obituary from the New York Times, for now:
If the flamboyant Roger Straus presented the public face of Farrar, Straus, Mr. Giroux, as editor-in-chief, was its quiet mover, working behind the scenes to shape its list of books and establishing himself as the gold standard of literary taste. The publisher Charles Scribner Jr., in his memoir, “In the Company of Writers: A Life in Publishing” (1991), wrote, “Giroux is a great man of letters, a great editor, and a great publisher.”
[...]
How many masterpieces Mr. Giroux discovered will be for the future to decide. As he himself insisted, it can take decades for a book to become a classic. Still, one of the first books he edited is now on any list of the century's best, Edmund Wilson's work on 19th-century socialist thinkers, "To the Finland Station" (1940); Mr. Giroux judged the manuscript to be nearly flawless.
He was also T. S. Eliot's American editor and published the American edition of George Orwell's "1984," accepting it at once despite the objection of his immediate superior, whose wife had found some of the novel's passages distasteful.
Mr. Giroux introduced a long roster of writers who would achieve fame, publishing first books by, among others, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. He edited Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott, Louise Bogan and William Golding.
[My screen is broken; I can't see the lower part. Please finish this for me if you choose to print it. Thanks]I haven't throught of that publishing house, much less of Mr.
Giroux for years. But my life was enriched by his writers, all of whom I read as an English major at Vanderbilt and the Iowa Writers Workshop. Donald Barthelme: I would phone him late at night, when both of us were drunkish but wide awake, and talk with him for hours. I did a favor for a friend in Santa Barbara; later, she invited my wife and me to a party in New York. Shortly after we arrived, she said "Now I have a present for you!" We went from the foyer to the sitting room, and there, to my amazement, sat a smiling Donald Barthelme. The first thing I did was apologize profusely for all those long late-night phone calls. He said, quite the contrary, he had been anxious as to whether or not he had brought as much to the conversations as I did. And that he came to look forward to our visits. I have had a full, rich life, but that was the high point. I wonder if any of the younger generations loves language to that extent today.