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...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
