Robert Giroux (April 8, 1914 — September 5, 2008) was an influential book editor and publisher for the latter half of the twentieth century. Born on April 8, 1914, Robert was the youngest of five children to Katharine and Arthur Giroux. His father was a foreman for a silk manufacturer and his mother a grade school teacher. Giroux was a working-class Catholic boy from New Jersey who dropped out of Regis in the Spring of his senior year after landing a newspaper job with the Jersey Journal, a rare opportunity during the Great Depression. He later became enamored with literature at Columbia and went on to become a renowned editor in the mold of his hero, Scribner's Max Perkins.

Giroux, in his blue banker's suit, was an "old maid," in the words of his star poet, Robert Lowell—and had consistent, unfailing devotion to his authors, whom he chose with virtually "perfect pitch." He started his editing career with Harcourt, Brace & Co. Eventually becoming editor-in-chief, he edited T. S. Eliot and discovered Jack Kerouac and William Gaddis, among others.

One of the more interesting anecdotes from his career is the story of how he joined Farrar, Straus & Company. As the executive editor at Harcourt Brace, Giroux stormed out on the company after they changed their mind at the eleventh hour and told him they didn't think one of his meticulously cultivated projects was right for the house. Although he wasn't able to publish the book, Mr. Giroux certainly came down on the right side of history—that book was J.D. Salinger's, "The Catcher in the Rye."

Giroux was hired away to work for Roger W. Straus, Jr. at Farrar & Straus in 1955. When Giroux joined Straus, a crowd of important authors, including Eliot, came along too. The firm eventually became known as Farrar, Straus and Giroux, after he became a partner and, later, its chairman. In recognition of his accomplishments, in 1988 Regis awarded him a diploma finally making him a full-fledged member of the Class of 1931.

In his career in editing and publishing that lasted over five decades, Giroux edited some of the most important voices in 20th century fiction, including, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf. He also published the first books of Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Stafford, Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Susan Sontag, Larry Woiwode and Randall Jarrell. In addition, he edited no fewer than seven Nobel laureates: Eliot, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, William Golding and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In a 1980 profile in The New York Times Book Review, poet Donald Hall wrote, "He is the only living editor whose name is bracketed with that of Maxwell Perkins,the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway."

Apart from his stellar career in publishing, Mr. Giroux also served his country in the Navy during World War II, achieving the rank of lieutenant commander on the aircraft carrier Essex. He wrote several books of his own and for seven years also served as President of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, an organization that fights movie censorship.