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The legendary editor Robert Giroux passed away last Friday, at the age of 94. Even though his name remains part of an eminent publishing house - Farrar, Straus, and Giroux – one imagines that even the best editors are forgotten well before decent authors. Still, those writers whose pages he personally tweaked and published will long remain in the (inter)national (reading community’s) consciousness: Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag, Bernard Malamud, Virginia Woolf, I.B. Singer, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot.

During his career he made some controversial decisions. Despite the objection of his superiors, for example, he published the American manuscript of Orwell’s 1984 (his boss’s wife had found some passages unsavory). Nevertheless, there were a couple gems that got away.

Although he published Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, when the beat author came into Giroux’s office with a scroll-manuscript over a hundred feet long, the editor said he had to pass. Kerouac called him a “crass idiot,” and went on to publish On The Road to, well, ridiculous acclaim. While in retrospect this is a little shocking, one wonders what would happen if a prima donna author demanded his unorthodoxly bound pages printed, even today, from a remarkable, but nonetheless conservative, publishing house. It's kind of like in "Arrested Development"? When Tobias is trying to get the attention of Hollywood producers? So he sends them gift bags full of glitter that goes all over their desks? ...that is, a gimmick, which in Kerouac's case just happened to be incredibly well-conceived.

Another incident is even less Giroux's fault. The full story is here. It describes the time when J.D. Salinger walked into his office, with a half-finished book he refused to talk about, but which Giroux nonetheless promised to publish.

“A year later a messenger came to the office with a package from Dorothy Olding, Salinger’s agent. ... There on the top page I read the title: The Catcher in the Rye. ...”

When he passed the book up to his boss, it got vetoed, on grounds that because their publishing house had a textbook department, and Catcher with its vaguely anti-establishment message might be detrimental to the textbook business, it had to be a no-go.

I’m reminded of the background story to the publication of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Written in the late 1960s, Toole sent the manuscript off to Simon and Schuster. At first they were excited, but eventually rejected the novel, allegedly saying that it “isn’t really about anything.” In 1969, Toole committed suicide. In the mid-70s, Toole’s mother found the text, and showed it to Walker Percy, an instructor at Loyola. Long story short (pun!...kinda), the book was published in 1980, and awarded the goddamn Pulitzer the next year. How could this talent have been missed the first time around?

Semi-related: Last summer, a somewhat clever, if cynical guy – David Lassman – sent off assorted chapters of novels by Jane Austen to eighteen different publishing houses:

Seventeen publishers rejected or ignored his bid for literary glory. Only one spotted the ruse and told him not to mimic Pride and Prejudice so closely.

Lassman, who decided on the experiment when struggling to get his own novel published, told British media: "Getting a novel accepted is very difficult today unless you have an agent first. But I had no idea of the scale of rejection poor old Jane suffered."

Oy.

These scenarios don’t even take into account the run-of-the-mill censorship scandals that prolonged the publication of works like Howl, Lolita, Tropic of Cancer, and Ulysses.

All this is both encouraging and discouraging to us fledgling writers out (t)here. On the one hand, it seems that no matter how good a novel might be, there’s still a chance it can – and probably will – get rejected.

Conversely, maybe our soon-to-be-finished manuscripts really are as good as we believe them to be, and even if haughty editors aren’t impressed, we will all somehow eventually be published to much acclaim...hopefully pre-posthumous.