Robert Giroux, one of the last of the great old-time editors, died yesterday at age 94. A classmate and friend of John Berryman when the two were Columbia undergraduates, Giroux worked for Harcourt, Brace and later for the firm that bears his name to this day: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His authors included Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Merton, and E. M. Forster. 
When I interviewed him for Columbia College Today in 1987, Giroux was cordial, even courtly, as he told me what it was like to take Mark Van Doren's Shakespeare course, where he met his future partner Roger Straus, and how the nature of literary publishing has changed. My favorite moment of the interview came when Giroux told me his coinage for something "that is almost but not quite a book": such a work he called an ook. In 1989 Giroux received the lifetime achievement citation from the National Book Critics Circle. When Giroux rose to approach the lectern, the packed auditorium stood and cheered. "I was proud to be a part of that ovation," Boston Globe book critic Mark Feeney remarked.
-- DL
From Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's obituary in the New York Times:
<<
After leaving the Navy, Mr. Giroux took an article he had written,
about the rescue of a fighter pilot downed at the Battle of Truk Lagoon
in the Pacific, to a Navy public information 0ffice in New York. There,
he said, he found the officer in charge, Lt. j.g. Roger W. Straus Jr.,
sitting with his feet up on his desk. Lieutenant Straus said he liked
the article and could get him $1,000 for it by selling it to a mass
publication. “Rescue at Truk” ran in Colliers magazine and was widely
anthologized.
***
. . . in 1955 [Giroux] joined Farrar, Straus & Company as editor in
chief. Almost 20 of his writers at Harcourt eventually followed him,
among them Eliot, [Robert] Lowell, [Flannery]O’Connor and [Bernard] Malamud. It was a display of
loyalty returned; Mr. Giroux was known for the care he lavished on his
writers, whether visiting [Jean] Stafford in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric
Clinic while she recovered from a breakdown or insisting that Eliot
raise his fee for poetry readings.
Farrar, Straus — founded in 1946 by Mr. Straus and John C. Farrar — made Mr. Giroux a partner in 1964. He ultimately became chairman. The first book to bear his imprint was Lowell’s book of poems “For the Union Dead.”
But his relations with Mr. Straus were not without friction. Where Mr. Giroux was the man of letters, Mr. Straus was a hard-bargaining businessman and something of a showman, giving gossipy parties at his Upper East Side townhouse. In the late 1960s, as the company’s 25th anniversary approached, Mr. Giroux proposed an anthology in celebration. Mr. Straus approved and told him to edit the selections and to write a preface. But when Mr. Straus read what Mr. Giroux had written, he demurred. His wife, Dorothea, he said, objected to how Mr. Giroux had described him on their first meeting, at the naval office — as having his feet on his desk.
“But you did, Roger,” Mr. Giroux recalled saying.
“Dorothea doesn’t like it,” Mr. Straus replied.
Mr. Giroux, convinced that it was really Mr. Straus who didn’t like it, angrily canceled the project, which never appeared. Mr. Straus died in 2004; Mr. Farrar in 1974.
Mr. Giroux did write several books of
his own, including “The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of
Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (Atheneum, 1982) and “A Deed of Death: The Story
Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond
Taylor” (Knopf, 1990), each of which was reviewed respectfully.
>>
You might also consult Matt Schudel's obit it in the Washington Post.
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