WEST TISBURY, Mass.

ROBERT GIROUX, long a partner in the publishing house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and lauded by many as the finest editor of his generation, died early last month in New Jersey at 94.

Among writers whose work he had published were T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, Robert Graves. E.M. Forster, Robert Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Bernard Malamud and Flannery O’Connor. Two famous works that got away were J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The former escaped him when his boss at Harcourt Brace over-rode his decision to publish it, recognizing it only as a book about a boy in prep school; the latter when Giroux insisted that he have the right to edit the manuscript of On the Road and Kerouac wouldn’t hear of it.

In a 1985 interview I had with him, he talked a little about bestsellers. At Columbia University, which he had attended with an eye to becoming a journalist, he had been the editor of the Columbia Review and published early works by a fellow-student, the religious philosopher Thomas Merton. Since Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain had become a bestseller, it led Giroux to note that there really is no way of predicting what will become one.

“And most of the time,” he said, “the bestseller is appalling from the literary standpoint and tends to be short-lived. Who remembers Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull or Jean Stratton Porter’s The Girl of the Limberlost or Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur today?” he asked. But he remarked that, as an editor and publisher, he did have a way of deciding whether to gamble on a writer.

“First of all, of course, you have to like what an author is offering. But then if you like it, you want to meet the writer because creativity is very much involved with energy. When I met Flannery O’Connor, I thought, here is a writer who will follow through — who has great energy — and so we published Wise Blood. The kind of energy I’m talking about can be detected in actors and opera stars, too. It isn’t limited to writers. But there has to be aliveness — mental aliveness — character.

“Sometimes writers are very shy. Elizabeth Bishop was very shy, but I knew when I met her that she also had great power and that that power would shine through in whatever she wrote.”

Giroux, who numbered among his close friends T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell, started out — despite his college editing career — at CBS radio, in 1938 and 1939, when Edward R. Murrow, William L. Shirer and H.V. Kaltenborn were broadcasting on events in Austria and Munich precipitated by Hitler. Giroux recognized that their reports were current history and put them all together as a book to be sent out as CBS publicity.

The work caught the attention of a Harcourt Brace editor and it wasn’t long before young Giroux had left CBS to become an editor there. He and Eliot became friends there when a senior editor couldn’t make a luncheon date with the poet and asked Giroux to substitute for him. Eliot had been a director of the English publishing firm Faber & Faber.

Young Giroux asked him if he thought that most editors were failed writers. “He thought that over and then he said, ‘Well, that may be. But so are most writers.’ The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes picked that one up.”

Giroux concluded that it was not usually the really talented writers who were difficult to deal with, but those with no confidence who resent criticism. “That’s one reason I find that energy ingredient so important. The better the writer is, the more intelligent he or she is about criticism. They’re not prickly when they’re good.”

And how is an editor persuaded to buy a book? Just a dab of it will give him a good idea, he said.

‘’You don’t have to eat the whole egg to find out if it’s rotten, do you? After two pages of reading, you should know if it’s worth reading any more.”

Giroux talked of the unreliability of the reading public. “Our culture has become illiterate. Our movies are aimed at 12-year-old minds. There’s been a deterioration of standards in the school and the family. Trash is inundating everything,” he grumbled.

Still, he emphasized that there would always be some people who won’t put up with junk, and that that is where literary publishers, such as the firm in which he was a partner (and that still exists though now under the ownership of the larger firm, Macmillan) continue to have a role to play.

Phyllis Méras, a former Journal editor and writer, is the author of many books.