Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections > Manuscripts > Finding Aids > Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Records

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Records, 1899-1992

• Summary
• Organizational History
• Scope and Content Note
• Series Descriptions
• Container List

Summary

Main Entry: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

Title: Records, 1885-1992. Bulk dates: 1945-1980

Size: 189 linear ft.

Access: Unrestricted

Source: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
19 Union Square West, New York, New York 10003
Purchase, 1992.

Processed by: John Bolender and Liavon Iurevich

Funding: We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., for providing funds for the processing of this collection.

Historical Statement:

The publishing company Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. was founded in 1945 as Farrar, Straus & Company by John Farrar and Roger Straus. After numerous changes in management and corresponding changes in name, the company became known as Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. (FSG) in 1964 when Robert Giroux became editor-in-chief. The company firmly established itself as a quality publisher in the 1960s and '70s. FSG remained staunchly independent of conglomerate publishing for many years. Even after selling controlling interest to the German publisher Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck in 1994, FSG maintained much of the freedom of an independent publishing house.

Description:

Correspondence, manuscripts, contracts, photographs, posters, audio tapes, bound volumes, and related materials documenting the rise of the firm from a small struggling house to a leading independent publishing company. Editorial files organized by author and book title comprise most of the collection. There is also a series consisting entirely of correspondence to and from Robert Giroux. The collection contains significant correspondence by or pertaining to Colette, T.S. Eliot, Wilhelm Reich, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Susan Sontag, Edmund Wilson, Tom Wolfe, and Marguerite Yourcenar.

Organizational History

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

John Farrar and Roger W. Straus III founded Farrar, Straus & Company in New York City in 1945. Farrar, of Farrar & Rinehart, left that firm in 1944 after returning from overseas duty in the Office of War Information. Straus, in addition to a background in journalism and magazine editing, also had the necessary financial resources to launch a publishing house. (Straus' mother was a Guggenheim, and his father's family were the Strauses who owned Macy's.) The original board included Farrar as chairman, Straus as president and chief executive officer, and Stanley Young, the well-known author and literary critic for The New York Times.

The company's first title, issued under a joint imprint with Duell Sloan & Pearce, was Yank, the G.I. Story of the War, a compilation of material from Yank, the Army's famous weekly publication. The first list included James Branch Cabell's There Were Two Pirates, a posthumous collection of short stories by Stephen Vincent Benét, an historical novel by Willa Gibbs, and Theodor Reik's Ritual: Psychoanalytic Studies. None of the first list's titles were substantially lucrative.

Despite publishing such works of quality as Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli (1947), Shirley Jackson's The Lottery (1949) and Alberto Moravia's The Woman of Rome (1949), the company remained in financial ill health until 1950. In that year, however, the firm successfully executed a number of coups saving it from ruin and placing it on the road to prominence. Early that year, (Bengamin) Gayelord Hauser, the popular fitness expert, having recently left the house of Coward-McCann, Inc., published Look Younger, Live Longer (partly ghost-written by Frances Warfield Hackett) with Farrar, Straus & Company. The book was a shot in the arm for the fledgling house, selling 300,000 copies in 1950 and 500,000 during the next ten years. The company executed another coup that year when Edmund Wilson left Doubleday due to a dispute over a legal bill and joined the Farrar, Straus & Company list. Straus also contracted for a collection of essays by Wilson which Random House had turned down the previous year. The essays were published in 1950 as Classics and Commercials, a literary chronicle of the 1940s. (Wilson would remain on the company's list for the rest of his life.) Also in 1950, André Gide was added to the list, and Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein's What the Jews Believe and Quentin Reynold's Courtroom proved to be bestsellers. With Young's rise to the rank of editor in December, the company underwent the first of many changes in name, becoming Farrar, Straus & Young. The following year witnessed yet another substantial step forward as the company acquired Creative Age Press from Eileen Garrett, thereby adding Robert Graves, Gerald Sykes and James Reynolds to its list.

In 1953, the acquisition of the Chicago company of Pellegrini & Cudahy brought with it not only the children's book company of Ariel Books but also a new partner, Sheila Cudahy. Cudahy replaced Young who resigned his managerial and editorial functions while remaining a member of the board. After briefly changing its name back to Farrar, Straus & Company, the firm became Farrar, Straus & Cudahy in 1955. In becoming a partner, Cudahy added many authors of Catholic interest to the firm's list. Accordingly, 1955 saw the beginning of Vision Books, a series of biographies of Catholic saints, martyrs and heroic figures designed for young (nine- to thirteen-year-old) readers. In the same vein, 1958 saw the acquisition of the Catholic publishing company of McMullen Books, Inc. The firm further established its reputation as a house of quality during the 1950s by publishing Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian's Memoirs as well as The Mask of Innocence and The Lamb written by the Nobel Laureate François Mauriac.

In 1955, Robert Giroux joined the firm as both editor-in-chief and vice-president. Giroux's first editing experience, while a student at Columbia University, was for The Columbia Review in which he published such future FSG authors as John Berryman and Thomas Merton. Giroux had been editor-in-chief of Harcourt Brace & Company since 1948 when he left for Farrar, Straus bringing with him seventeen new authors including T. S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, John Berryman and Bernard Malamud. Never before had such a large number of important authors followed an editor from one house to another. In 1964, two years after Cudahy's departure, Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead became the first title to be published under the Farrar, Straus & Giroux imprint. Under the combined leadership of these three men, the company firmly established itself as a quality house in the 1960s and 1970s.

Over the years, FSG has acquired many publishing houses of quality. In 1957, the firm purchased L. C. Page & Company, a long-established publisher of children's books and reprints of classic novels (see L. C. Page: Organizational History below). The acquisition of Noonday Press, Inc. in 1960 added the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer to the house's list. The acquisitions of Octagon Books, Inc. in 1968 and Hill & Wang, Inc. in 1971 (see Hill & Wang: Organizational History below) further strengthened the company.

After John Farrar's retirement in 1972 and death two years later, Roger Straus took on a greater leadership role in the company, becoming a staunch opponent of conglomerate takeovers in publishing. In the late 1970s, Straus resigned from the Association of American Publishers because of what he considered to be its tendency to defend conglomerates over authors and independent publishers.

By the late 1970s, Farrar, Straus & Giroux was publishing such noteworthy authors as Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, John McPhee, Donald Barthelme and Jean Stafford. By 1990, FSG had published the following Pulitzer prize winning books: 77 Dream Songs (1965) by John Berryman, The Fixer (1967) by Bernard Malamud, Collected Stories (1970) by Jean Stafford, The Dolphin (1974) by Robert Lowell, Lamy of Santa Fe (1975) by Paul Horgan, The Morning of the Poem (1981) by James Schuyler and The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1990) by Oscar Hijuelos. Between 1945 and 1985, the firm published the work of thirteen authors who were, or who were to become, Nobel laureates. They include Joseph Brodsky, Elias Canetti, T.S. Eliot, William Golding, Nadine Gordimer, Knut Hamsun, Hermann Hesse, Juan Ramon Jimenez, François Mauriac, Czeslaw Milosz, Salvatore Quasimodo, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Derek Walcott among others. In addition to its many Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning authors, FSG has assured its financial independence by occasionally publishing books directed toward a popular audience. In addition to works by Gayelord Hauser, such books include David Stern's Francis (1946), a story about a talking mule; Kenneth Heuer's Men of Other Planets (1950); and Dorothy Finkelhor's How to Make Your Emotions Work for You (1952).

In 1994, FSG sold controlling interest to the German publisher Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, a company which also owns Henry Holt and St. Martin's Press. Nonetheless, Farrar, Straus & Giroux has retained much of the freedom of an independent publishing house.

Hill & Wang

Hill & Wang was founded by Lawrence Hill and Arthur Wang in New York City in 1956. Both Wang and Hill had formerly worked at the publishing firm of A. A. Wyn, Inc., Wang as editor-in-chief and Hill as sales manager. The partners launched their new firm by purchasing eighty-eight backlist titles from Wyn as well as five outstanding contracts for future titles.

Hill & Wang earned its initial reputation that same year by inaugurating the Dramabooks series. Dramabooks originally presented the work of such drama critics as G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Its Mermaids series also presented seventeenth-century English plays. Eventually, the works of such twentieth-century playwrights as Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Jean Anouilh, Max Frisch and Arthur Kopit were added to the Dramabooks series. Dramabooks also includes ten volumes of Lanford Wilson's plays including Hot L Baltimore (1970).

In 1959, Hill & Wang bought the rights to twenty-six titles in the American Century series from Thomas Yoseloff. This was the beginning of extensive publishing of U.S. literature by the firm. Hill & Wang has also published scholarly nonfiction in the areas of semiotics, science, and politics. The company has published translations of eighteen books by Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (1977) and A Lover's Discourse (1977) among them. In 1979, Hill & Wang published an illustrated edition of Darwin's The Origin of Species abridged and annotated by the paleontologist Richard Leakey. A number of political titles prepared by the American Friends Service Committee have appeared under the Hill & Wang imprint. These include Peace in Vietnam (1968), Struggle for Justice (1971) and A Compassionate Peace (1982).

In 1971, Farrar, Straus & Giroux acquired Hill & Wang, making the company a division of FSG in the process. That same year, Hill left to form his own publishing company, Lawrence Hill & Company. Wang has remained as editor-in-chief of the Hill & Wang imprint.

L.C. Page & Company

In 1891, having recently graduated from Harvard, Lewis Coues Page began working for the Boston publishing firm of Estes & Lauriat of which his stepfather, Dana Estes, was a partner. Page was soon made treasurer of the Joseph Knight Company, a division of Estes & Lauriat. When Knight resigned in 1896, Page assumed leadership of Knight's former company and renamed it L. C. Page & Company.

Although L.C. Page initially published such contemporary novelists as Gabriele d'Annunzio, it soon found a niche in juvenile series including Lucy Maud Montgomery's popular Anne of Green Gables series beginning in 1908. But the greatest success of all was the 1913 publication of Eleanor Hodgman Porter's Pollyana. The story of the tirelessly cheerful young Pollyanna sold more than a million copies in its first year. The multi-volume series which followed, written mostly by other authors, led to the addition of the word "Pollyanna" to North American English.

In addition to its series for young readers, the company published reprints of established classics by authors such as Victor Hugo, Omar Khayyam, Leo Tolstoy, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron and Alexandre Dumas. The literary conservatism of L.C. Page & Company, however, proved to be the undoing of its independence. Mr. Page abhorred what he called "sophisticated literature," by which he evidently meant contemporary fiction especially if by a foreign author. In 1937, he declared that the great bulk of the U.S. public simply wanted reprints of classics and had no taste for more modern writing. Predictably, the company's sales declined. In 1957, the year following Page's death, his firm was acquired by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Inc. which had become successful publishing the very literature which Page had disdained.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux discontinued the L. C. Page imprint in 1980.

Forward to FSG Records. Scope and Content Note

M. Yolles
June 1997