Parent company | Macmillan Publishers |
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Founded | 1946 |
Founder |
John C. Farrar Roger W. Straus, Jr. |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | New York, New York |
Key people | Jonathan Galassi |
Imprints | Hill & Wang, North Point, Sarah Crichton |
Official website | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus, Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Peace Prizes. The publisher is currently a division of MacMillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux was founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus, Jr. and John C. Farrar. The first years of existence were rough until they published the diet book Look Younger, Live Longer by Gayelord Hauser in 1950. The book went on to sell 500,000 copies and Straus said that the book carried them along for awhile. In the early years, Straus and his wife Dorthea, went prospecting for books in Italy. It was there that they found the memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi and other rising Italian authors Alberto Moravia, Giovanni Guareschi and Cesare Pavese. Farrar, Straus also poached or lured away authors from other publishers—one was Edmund Wilson who was unhappy with Random House at the time but remained with Farrar, Straus for the remainder of his career.
Robert Giroux joined the company in 1955 and after he later became a partner, the name was changed to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Giroux had been working for Harcourt and had been angered when Harcourt refused to allow him to publish Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Giroux brought many literary authors with him including Thomas Merton, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Flannery O'Connor, Jack Kerouac, Peter Taylor, Randall Jarrell, T.S. Eliot, and Bernard Malamud. Alan Williams described Giroux's 'Pied Piper sweep' as "almost certainly the greatest number of authors to follow, on their own iniative, a single editor from house to house in the history of modern publishing." In 1964, Straus named Giroux chairman of the board and officially added Giroux's name to the publishing company.