Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• 1. Introduction

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  Farrar, Straus and Giroux has published authors who won the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. The company started in 1945, when John C. Farrar and Roger W. Straus Jr. set out to publish literary books. The first years were rough. What rescued the fledgling house was not a novel or a poem collection but a diet book. Look Younger, Live Longer by Gayelord Hauser sold 500,000 copies in 1950. Straus later credited it with sustaining the company through its early years. That windfall gave the house room to become something different. The company's name would change multiple times before 1964, when it settled into the form the world knows today.

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• 2. Prospecting for Literature

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  Yank: The G.I. Story of the War, a compilation of articles from the Army's weekly newspaper, was the company's first book. The second was There Were Two Pirates, a novel by James Branch Cabell. These were modest beginnings for a house with larger intentions.

  Roger Straus and his wife Dorothea traveled to Italy in those early years, looking for books that other American publishers had not yet noticed. In Italy they found Carlo Levi's memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli. They also came away with a roster of rising Italian writers: Alberto Moravia, Giovannino Guareschi, and Cesare Pavese. Back home, Straus was equally willing to draw established writers from rival houses. Edmund Wilson, unhappy with Random House at the time, moved to Farrar, Straus and stayed for the remainder of his career.

  The company's name shifted in 1950 to reflect a new partner. Stanley Young, a playwright, an author, a literary critic for The New York Times, and an original stockholder and board member, joined the masthead. Three years later, Pellegrini and Cudahy merged with the firm. The partner who would give the house its lasting name, Robert Giroux, had not yet arrived.

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• 3. The Pied Piper Editor

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  Robert Giroux joined the company in 1955. He left Harcourt after the publisher blocked his plan to release Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. He arrived at Farrar, Straus not alone but with a following that few editors in publishing history had matched. Thomas Merton, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Flannery O'Connor, Jack Kerouac, Peter Taylor, Randall Jarrell, T.S. Eliot, and Bernard Malamud all came with him.

  Alan Williams named the migration the "Pied Piper sweep." In Williams's words, it was "almost certainly the greatest number of authors to follow, on their own initiative, a single editor from house to house in the history of modern publishing." Giroux later became a partner, and in 1964 Roger Straus named him chairman of the board. When John Farrar died, Straus would keep running the house for twenty more years before deciding what to do with it.

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• 4. Sold to Holtzbrinck

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  In 1993, Roger Straus sold a majority interest in the company to the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, a privately owned German conglomerate. Straus picked the Holtzbrinck family for a specific reason: their long record of supporting serious literary work. The sale placed Farrar, Straus and Giroux within the Macmillan group, with Holtzbrinck as the ultimate parent. Jonathan Galassi would serve as both president and publisher, guiding the house into the twenty-first century.

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• 5. The Twenty-First Century

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  In 2018, Mitzi Angel succeeded Galassi as publisher. Angel had joined the company a decade earlier from Fourth Estate in the UK. She took charge of the Faber and Faber Inc. imprint in 2008. She was named president in 2021. Jenna Johnson was named vice president and editor in chief in December 2021. She took the role from Eric Chinski, who moved to senior executive editor after fifteen years as editor in chief.

  MCD/FSG launched as a laboratory for new styles and genres under editor Sean McDonald. He was later joined by Daphne Durham, formerly editor-in-chief and publisher at Amazon Publishing. Durham left MCD in 2023 to join Putnam. Quanta Books emerged from a partnership between FSG and the Simons Foundation, built around the audience of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Quanta Magazine. Hill and Wang continued to publish books of academic interest in history, with authors including Roland Barthes, William Cronon, Langston Hughes, and Elie Wiesel. North Point Press specialized in literary nonfiction: natural history, travel, music, food, and cultural criticism. Its authors have included Peter Matthiessen, Beryl Markham, and M. F. K. Fisher.

  In February 2015, FSG and Faber and Faber announced the end of their partnership. All books previously released under that imprint were moved to the FSG colophon by August 2016. AUWA Books, directed by Questlove, has set out to find inspiring new stories and connect readers to lost voices.

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