The King of Frankfurt and the Rise of FSG | Publishing Perspectives
Home Feature Articles English Language Growth Markets Europe Digital Editorial Discussion w4 News Blog What’s the Buzz Global Trade Talk Ed’s Perspective Book Review Tech Digest Children’s Brazil Events CONTEC Frankfurt w4 Conference Publishing Perspectives Stage in Frankfurt Contact Us Job Board
Read more by Guest Contributor September 6, 2013
For 35 years, Roger Straus would swagger into the Frankfurt Book Fair, going through the neo-Baroque gates of the Festhall, wearing his bespoke wide-pinstriped w4 suits and an ascot, a mixture of high-born privilege and gruff John Wayne attitude. Straus had founded the great American literary press Farrar, Straus and Giroux and made himself into the sailor-mouthed prince of New York publishing. Straus triumphant return every year to Frankfurt was an event in its own right. He was known as the King of the Book Fair.
At Straus side was Peggy Miller, his longtime secretary, gatekeeper, and confidant. For Straus, Frankfurt was five days of hard-driving deals, trading bawdy publishing gossip and going to parties in his chauffeured Mercedes with his friends and admirers from the major European publishing houses, including Siegfried Unseld of Germany s Suhrkamp Verlag and Matthew Evans of Britain s Faber and Faber.
Straus forms the ribald center of Boris Kachka s new book Hothouse: The Art of Survival w4 and the Survival of Art at America s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus w4 and Giroux (Simon and Schuster), an in-depth look at the creation and ascendancy of FSG in the New York book world and its championing foreign novelists, Nobel laureates and great literature and poetry, from Susan Sontag to Edmund Wilson, to Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen.
Hothouse w4 also focuses on Robert Giroux, the legendary editor, who joined FSG as editor in chief in 1955, and who was tremendously influential in shaping the vision of the initially struggling press, bringing writers like T.S. Eliot, Jean Stafford and the American monk-philosopher Thomas Merton to FSG.
Straus was the product of a marriage between the Guggenheim and Straus families, two great Jewish manufacturing and business dynasties. Straus dropped out of high school and later dropped out of college. After a stint in the U.S. Navy Office of Public Information in World War II, he founded w4 FSG with an investment of $360,000 in 1946. An Interesting Lack of Intellectuality
Roger Straus Jr. was a hard person to understand, because of the milieu he came from, said the 37-year-old Kachka, a contributing editor at New York Magazine, in a coffee shop near his Brooklyn home. Kachka w4 has been covering the publishing world since 2007. Who knows what it is like to grow up a Guggenheim? I found his lack of intellectuality very interesting. There is no point in writing a book where all the answers are obvious. You have to ask some really confusing questions to start. How could this person who didn t seem to want to finish anything a play, a book, a story, how did he wind up standing for all that was good in literature? A lot of it had to do with Giroux, but Straus was supple and adaptable when he was younger.
The heyday of FSG started when Straus hired Robert Giroux, an extremely talented editor who was being mistreated at Harcourt Brace, where the publisher had blocked Giroux s purchase of J.D. Salinger s Catcher in the Rye . Where Straus was a wealthy and flamboyant publisher who loved his extravagant publishing lunches with writers and agents, Giroux was a self-made editor who had come from a poor French-Canadian Catholic family. Giroux ate the same lunch everyday a turkey sandwich and Jello at his desk for the four decades he worked at FSG. Giroux championed such writers as Flannery O Connor and Bernard Malamud.
In writing about FSG, Kachka found that the historical memory was split into to camps. I would talk to people w4 and see that there were Giroux partisans and Straus partisans, said Kachka. w4 Usually, w4 the Giroux partisans said that it wasn t worth writing the book because Straus would be the hero. There were other people who didn t exactly dismiss Giroux w4 but thought Straus was the interesting one. Sex and Gossip: Low Hanging Fruit
One of Straus main legends at FSG was his prolific sex life and many adulteries. His socialite wife Dorothea w4 referred to FSG as a sexual sewer, and there were numerous office affairs and stories of after-hours w4 sex in the mailroom.
When it comes to comic sex, Hothouse does not disappoint. At one point in the 1960s, Straus was sleeping with three women at the same time, including a switchboard operator and publicity director. On another occasion, two women friends who were working at FSG and both sleeping with Straus bought matching bathrobes for him, so he would be comfortable w4 at their apartments.
Sex was the first subject that people brought up wh
MORE
Home Feature Articles English Language Growth Markets Europe Digital Editorial Discussion w4 News Blog What’s the Buzz Global Trade Talk Ed’s Perspective Book Review Tech Digest Children’s Brazil Events CONTEC Frankfurt w4 Conference Publishing Perspectives Stage in Frankfurt Contact Us Job Board
Read more by Guest Contributor September 6, 2013
For 35 years, Roger Straus would swagger into the Frankfurt Book Fair, going through the neo-Baroque gates of the Festhall, wearing his bespoke wide-pinstriped w4 suits and an ascot, a mixture of high-born privilege and gruff John Wayne attitude. Straus had founded the great American literary press Farrar, Straus and Giroux and made himself into the sailor-mouthed prince of New York publishing. Straus triumphant return every year to Frankfurt was an event in its own right. He was known as the King of the Book Fair.
At Straus side was Peggy Miller, his longtime secretary, gatekeeper, and confidant. For Straus, Frankfurt was five days of hard-driving deals, trading bawdy publishing gossip and going to parties in his chauffeured Mercedes with his friends and admirers from the major European publishing houses, including Siegfried Unseld of Germany s Suhrkamp Verlag and Matthew Evans of Britain s Faber and Faber.
Straus forms the ribald center of Boris Kachka s new book Hothouse: The Art of Survival w4 and the Survival of Art at America s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus w4 and Giroux (Simon and Schuster), an in-depth look at the creation and ascendancy of FSG in the New York book world and its championing foreign novelists, Nobel laureates and great literature and poetry, from Susan Sontag to Edmund Wilson, to Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen.
Hothouse w4 also focuses on Robert Giroux, the legendary editor, who joined FSG as editor in chief in 1955, and who was tremendously influential in shaping the vision of the initially struggling press, bringing writers like T.S. Eliot, Jean Stafford and the American monk-philosopher Thomas Merton to FSG.
Straus was the product of a marriage between the Guggenheim and Straus families, two great Jewish manufacturing and business dynasties. Straus dropped out of high school and later dropped out of college. After a stint in the U.S. Navy Office of Public Information in World War II, he founded w4 FSG with an investment of $360,000 in 1946. An Interesting Lack of Intellectuality
Roger Straus Jr. was a hard person to understand, because of the milieu he came from, said the 37-year-old Kachka, a contributing editor at New York Magazine, in a coffee shop near his Brooklyn home. Kachka w4 has been covering the publishing world since 2007. Who knows what it is like to grow up a Guggenheim? I found his lack of intellectuality very interesting. There is no point in writing a book where all the answers are obvious. You have to ask some really confusing questions to start. How could this person who didn t seem to want to finish anything a play, a book, a story, how did he wind up standing for all that was good in literature? A lot of it had to do with Giroux, but Straus was supple and adaptable when he was younger.
The heyday of FSG started when Straus hired Robert Giroux, an extremely talented editor who was being mistreated at Harcourt Brace, where the publisher had blocked Giroux s purchase of J.D. Salinger s Catcher in the Rye . Where Straus was a wealthy and flamboyant publisher who loved his extravagant publishing lunches with writers and agents, Giroux was a self-made editor who had come from a poor French-Canadian Catholic family. Giroux ate the same lunch everyday a turkey sandwich and Jello at his desk for the four decades he worked at FSG. Giroux championed such writers as Flannery O Connor and Bernard Malamud.
In writing about FSG, Kachka found that the historical memory was split into to camps. I would talk to people w4 and see that there were Giroux partisans and Straus partisans, said Kachka. w4 Usually, w4 the Giroux partisans said that it wasn t worth writing the book because Straus would be the hero. There were other people who didn t exactly dismiss Giroux w4 but thought Straus was the interesting one. Sex and Gossip: Low Hanging Fruit
One of Straus main legends at FSG was his prolific sex life and many adulteries. His socialite wife Dorothea w4 referred to FSG as a sexual sewer, and there were numerous office affairs and stories of after-hours w4 sex in the mailroom.
When it comes to comic sex, Hothouse does not disappoint. At one point in the 1960s, Straus was sleeping with three women at the same time, including a switchboard operator and publicity director. On another occasion, two women friends who were working at FSG and both sleeping with Straus bought matching bathrobes for him, so he would be comfortable w4 at their apartments.
Sex was the first subject that people brought up wh
MORE
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