Robert Giroux

There may have been no more unerring, more exquisitely sensitive instrument than the perfectly tuned literary taste of Robert Giroux, who died Sept. 5 at age 94. The son of a New Jersey silk manufacturer, he became one of the great editors of the 20th century. Eternally alert to the possibility that any tattered, unheralded manuscript could be a masterpiece in embryo, he published the first books of Jack Kerouac, Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Susan Sontag and Flannery O'Connor. In his long career, he edited seven Nobel laureates: T.S. Eliot, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Isaac Bashevis Singer, William Golding, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. Giroux visited Ezra Pound when he was incarcerated in a mental hospital; he did the same for Robert Lowell. He once said his greatest professional regret was being unable to print J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye; he acquired it for his publisher, but another executive nixed it. (Not long after, he left to join the firm that would eventually bear his name, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.) Giroux had ambitions as a writer himself, somewhat fulfilled: he wrote a memoir and a book about Shakespeare's sonnets. But it was in the less public, less glorious role of editor that he made his contribution to literary history, playing handmaiden to genius and troubleshooting the delicate connection between author and muse.