The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America's Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Simon & Schuster
August 2013
On Sale: August 6, 2013
448 pages ISBN: 1451691890 EAN: 9781451691894 Kindle: B00A285MCG Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
Farrar, Straus and Giroux is arguably the most influential
publishing house of the modern era. Home to an unrivaled
twenty-five Nobel Prize winners and generation-defining
authors like T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag,
Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen,
it’s a cultural institution whose importance approaches that
of The New Yorker or The New York Times. But
FSG is no ivory tower—the owner's wife called the office a
“sexual sewer”—and its untold story is as tumultuous and
engrossing as many of the great novels it has published.
Boris Kachka deftly reveals the era and the city that
built FSG through the stories of two men: founder-owner
Roger Straus, the pugnacious black sheep of his powerful
German-Jewish family—with his bottomless supply of ascots,
charm, and vulgarity of every stripe—and his utter opposite,
the reticent, closeted editor Robert Giroux, who rose from
working-class New Jersey to discover the novelists and poets
who helped define American culture. Giroux became one of T.
S. Eliot’s best friends, just missed out on The Catcher
in the Rye, and played the placid caretaker to
manic-depressive geniuses like Robert Lowell, John Berryman,
Jean Stafford, and Jack Kerouac. Straus, the brilliant
showman, made Susan Sontag a star, kept Edmund Wilson out of
prison, and turned Isaac Bashevis Singer from a Yiddish
scribbler into a Nobelist—even as he spread the gossip on
which literary New York thrived.
A prolific lover
and an epic fighter, Straus ventured fearlessly, and
sometimes recklessly, into battle for his books, his
authors, and his often-struggling company. When a talented
editor left for more money and threatened to take all his
writers, Roger roared, “Over my dead body”—and meant it. He
turned a philosophical disagreement with Simon &
Schuster head Dick Snyder into a mano a mano media war that
caught writers such as Philip Roth and Joan Didion in the
crossfire. He fought off would-be buyers like S. I. Newhouse
(“that dwarf”) with one hand and rapacious literary agents
like Andrew Wylie (“that shit”) with the other. Even his own
son and presumed successor was no match for a man who had to
win at any cost—and who was proven right at almost every
turn.
At the center of the story, always, are the
writers themselves. After giving us a fresh perspective on
the postwar authors we thought we knew, Kachka pulls back
the curtain to expose how elite publishing works today. He
gets inside the editorial meetings where writers’ fates are
decided; he captures the adrenaline rush of bidding wars for
top talent; and he lifts the lid on the high-stakes pursuit
of that rarest commodity, public attention—including a
fly-on-the-wall account of the explosive confrontation
between Oprah Winfrey and Jonathan Franzen, whose
relationship, Franzen tells us, “was bogus from the
start.”
Vast but detailed, full of both fresh gossip
and keen insight into how the literary world works,
Hothouse is the product of five years of research and
nearly two hundred interviews by a veteran New York
magazine writer. It tells an essential story for the first
time, providing a delicious inside perspective on the rich
pageant of postwar cultural life and illuminating the vital
intellectual center of the American Century.
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