Roger W. Straus, Jr.
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Roger Williams Straus, Jr. (January 3, 1917 - May 25, 2004) was co-founder of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a New York book publishing company. Strauss, along with John Farrar, began the influential firm of Farrar and Straus in 1945. In 1955, the company hired editor Robert Giroux away from rival Harcourt, Brace, who brought along authors such as T. S. Eliot and Flannery O'Connor, among others. Ultimately, in 1994, twenty years after his partner Farrar had died, Straus determined he could no longer run the company, retired, and sold the business to a German publishing conglomerate, Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the type of company he had long disdained and spoke out against.
Straus was regarded as one of the last, old-fashioned publishers, faithful to his company and tight with his money, but emphasizing quality over commercial success. His dedication to the publishing business earned him several Nobel Prize-winning authors, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Czeslaw Milosz and T. S. Eliot, and Pulitzer Prize authors such as Robert Lowell, John McPhee, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud.
Straus grew up in a wealthy and influential family. His mother was Gladys Guggenheim, heir to one of the largest fortunes in America. His father, Roger W. Straus, was chairman of the American Smelting and Refining Co., which was owned by his wife's family. Straus' paternal grandfather, Oscar S. Straus, served as Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt.