Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams 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 Prizes. Since 1993, the publisher has been a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

Founding

Farrar, Straus, and Company was founded in 1945 by Roger W. Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. The first book was Yank: The G.I. Story of the War, a compilation of articles that appeared in Yank, the Army Weekly, then There Were Two Pirates, a novel by James Branch Cabell.

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 a while.), a literary critic for The New York Times, and an original stockholder and board member).

Merger

In 1953, Pellegrini & Cudahy merged with Farrar, Straus & Young.

Robert Giroux joined the company in 1955, and after he later became a partner, the name was changed to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Straus offered FSG to the Holtzbrinck family because of their reputation for publishing serious works of literature. Jenna Johnson was named vice president and editor in chief in December 2021, taking the baton from Eric Chinski who was named senior executive editor after 15 years as editor in chief. Other notable editors include Sean McDonald and Alex Star.

In February 2015, FSG and Faber and Faber announced the end of their partnership. All books scheduled for release and previously released under the imprint were moved to the FSG colophon by August 2016.

Name history

  • Farrar, Straus, and Company (1945–1951)
  • Farrar, Straus and Young (1950–1956)
  • Farrar, Straus and Cudahy (1953–1963) – acquired L.C. Page & Co. in 1957
  • Farrar, Straus, and Company (1963–1964) after Cudahy left the firm.
  • Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1964–present)

Current imprints

  • MCD/FSG, which is viewed as a kind of a lab to experiment with new styles and genres. The imprint is headed by Sean McDonald, who was joined by Daphne Durham, formerly editor-in-chief and publisher of Amazon Publishing, as executive director to launch the imprint. Durham left MCD in 2023 to join Putnum.
  • FSG Originals
  • AUWA Books is an imprint directed by Questlove, the celebrated musician, producer, director, and author devoted to finding inspiring new stories and connecting readers to lost voices while building a community of curious minds.
  • Quanta Books is a partnership between FSG and the Simons Foundation which illuminates humanity’s quest to understand the universe. From the founding editor of Pulitzer Prize-winning Quanta Magazine.
  • Hill and Wang publishes books of academic interest and specializes in history. Its authors include Roland Barthes, William Cronon, Langston Hughes, and Elie Wiesel.
  • North Point Press published literary nonfiction with an emphasis on natural history, travel, ecology, music, food, and cultural criticism. Its authors include Peter Matthiessen, Beryl Markham, Guy Davenport, A. J. Liebling, Margaret Visser, Wendell Berry, and M. F. K. Fisher.

Former imprints

  • Sarah Crichton Books published books with a slightly commercial bent. The imprint launched with Cathleen Falsani's The God Factor in 2006. Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone was a bestseller and a Starbucks-featured book in 2007.
  • Faber and Faber Inc. published a backlist of drama and books on the arts, entertainment, music, pop culture, cultural criticism, and the media. Its authors included David Auburn, Margaret Edson, Doug Wright, Richard Greenberg, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Neil LaBute, Peter Conrad, Martin Eisenstadt and Courtney Love.
  • Scientific American / FSG, led by Amanda Moon, published non-fiction popular science books for the general reader. Its authors included Jesse Bering, Daniel Chamovitz, Kevin Dutton, and Caleb Scharf.
  • Noonday Press
  • FSG Originals x Logic, a short-lived imprint for technology books that published Blockchain Chicken Farm.

Bibliography

Books for Young Readers

FSG Books for Young Readers publishes National Book Award winners Madeleine L'Engle (1980), William Steig (1983), Louis Sachar (1998), and Polly Horvath (2003). Books for Young Readers also publishes Natalie Babbitt, Roald Dahl, Jack Gantos, George Selden, Uri Shulevitz, Ozge Samanci, and Peter Sis. FSG Books for Young Readers is operated by Macmillan Children's Publishing Group.

Awards

; Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature

  • Knut Hamsun (1920)
  • Hermann Hesse (1946)
  • T. S. Eliot (1948)
  • Pär Lagerkvist (1951)
  • François Mauriac (1952)
  • Juan Ramón Jiménez (1956)
  • Salvatore Quasimodo (1959)
  • Nelly Sachs (1966)
  • Yasunari Kawabata (1968)
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970)
  • Pablo Neruda (1971)
  • Eugenio Montale (1975)
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978)
  • Czesław Miłosz (1980)
  • Elias Canetti (1981)
  • William Golding (1983)
  • Wole Soyinka (1986)
  • Joseph Brodsky (1987)
  • Camilo José Cela (1989)
  • Nadine Gordimer (1991)
  • Derek Walcott (1992)
  • Seamus Heaney (1995)
  • Mario Vargas Llosa (2010)
  • Peter Handke (2019)
  • Louise Glück (2020)

; Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize

  • Norman Angell (1933)
  • Elie Wiesel (1986)
  • Nelson Mandela (1993)

; Winners of the Pulitzer Prize

  • John Berryman (1965)
  • Bernard Malamud (1967)
  • Jean Stafford (1970)
  • Robert Lowell (1974)
  • Paul Horgan (1976)
  • Lanford Wilson (1980)
  • James Schuyler (1981)
  • Charles Fuller (1982)
  • Marsha Norman (1983)
  • Thomas L. Friedman (1983, 1988, 2002)
  • Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
  • Charles Wright (1998)
  • Michael Cunningham (1999)
  • John McPhee (1999)
  • Margaret Edson (1999)
  • C. K. Williams (2000)
  • David Auburn (2001)
  • Louis Menand (2002)
  • Jeffrey Eugenides (2003)
  • Paul Muldoon (2003)
  • Doug Wright (2004)
  • Marilynne Robinson (2005)
  • Elizabeth A. Fenn (2015)
  • Frank Bidart (2017)
  • James Forman Jr. (2018)
  • Anne Boyer (2020)

; Winners of the National Book Award

  • Bernard Malamud (1959, 1967)
  • Robert Lowell (1960)
  • John Berryman (1969)
  • Elizabeth Bishop (1970)
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer (1970, 1974)
  • Donald Barthelme (1972)
  • Flannery O'Connor (1972)
  • Richard B. Sewall (1975)
  • Michael J. Arlen (1976)
  • Tom Wolfe (1980)
  • Paula Fox (1983)
  • Larry Heinemann (1987)
  • Thomas L. Friedman (1989)
  • Alice McDermott (1998)
  • Edward Ball (1998)
  • Susan Sontag (2000)
  • Jonathan Franzen (2001)
  • Shirley Hazzard (2003)
  • C. K. Williams (2003)
  • Richard Powers (2006)
  • Denis Johnson (2007)
  • George Packer (2013)
  • Louise Glück (2014)
  • Evan Osnos (2014)

Notable authors

Staff

Jack Kerouac's then-girlfriend Joyce Johnson started work in 1957, when Sheila Cudahy was a partner at the firm.

References

Further reading

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  • Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers
  • Work in Progress, an Online Magazine by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Farrar, Straus & Giroux Collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin