Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections > Manuscripts > Finding Aids > Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Records

Scope and Content Note

The Farrar, Straus & Giroux Records consist of letters, book manuscripts, contracts, photographs, audio tapes and catalogs chronicling the history and ongoing concerns of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and its subsidiaries Hill & Wang and L. C. Page & Company. The correspondents include authors, editors, other publishing companies, literary agents, attorneys, distributors, reviewers, and fans. The letters concern royalties, reprint rights, promotional efforts, contract negotiations, copy-editing, book design, foreign sales, publication dates and other concerns surrounding the publication, distribution, promotion and reprinting of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Hill & Wang and L.C. Page titles. Interspersed among the correspondence are contracts and manuscripts of stories, poems and essays, some of which contain authors' notations.

In addition to John Farrar, Roger Straus and Robert Giroux, correspondents include Donald Barthelme, John Berryman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Madeleine L'Engle, Bernard Malamud, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Susan Sontag, Francis Steegmuller, Mark Van Doren, Derek Walcott, Edmund Wilson, Tom Wolfe, Marguerite Yourcenar and many other notable authors.

There are also files devoted wholly to correspondence to and from Robert Giroux. Some of this correspondence is more personal in nature than what is found in the rest of the collection, reflecting his interests in opera and film, his travels and many social engagements with such people as T.S. and Valerie Eliot, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. In a subseries marked "Tracers," there is business correspondence from Giroux and his administrative assistants providing a running chronicle of the day-to-day concerns of a modern publishing company. The topics include translation agreements, prospective employees and interns, manuscripts submitted for possible publication, evaluations of requests to quote from FSG authors and negotiations of contractual terms.

The collection also contains microfilms made for FSG of book manuscripts, paper copies of which may no longer be extant.

Additional items include photographs of authors and book illustrations, audio tapes of John Berryman reading from his poems, and FSG catalogs

Forward to FSG Records. Series Descriptions