Eliot, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Merton, and published the first books of Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Stafford, Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Susan Sontag, Larry Woiwode and Randall Jarrell and edited no fewer than seven Nobel laureates: Eliot, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, William Golding and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

[6] His sisters Josephine and Estelle both left high school to work and contribute money so that Bob could continue his education.

He attended Regis High School in Manhattan, but dropped out during the Depression, to take a job with local newspaper, the Jersey Journal.

His main classroom mentors were the poet and critic Mark Van Doren and Raymond Weaver, the first biographer of Herman Melville, who had discovered the novella, Billy Budd in manuscript form in 1924.

Giroux started his career with a job with the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in public relations.

After working there for four years, he found his first editing job as a junior editor, at Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1940.

[7] After leaving the navy, he took his article about the rescue of a fighter pilot downed at the Battle of Truk Lagoon in the Pacific to a Navy public information Office in New York, where the officer in charge, Lt. Roger W. Straus Jr., suggested that he could get him $1,000 by selling it to a mass publication.

Impressed by Lowell's manuscript, Giroux published the collection Lord Weary's Castle immediately, and it went on to win the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Of his seven Nobel prize winners, who included Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Derek Walcott, William Golding, Seamus Heaney, and Nadine Gordimer, the only one born in the United States was T.S.

In the same Plimpton interview, he revealed how as a young editor at Harcourt, Brace & Co., he won the opportunity to publish The Catcher in the Rye, the 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger, but lost it after the textbook department noted "Not for us", rejecting the manuscript.

Among the writers Giroux discovered or developed at FSG were Jack Kerouac, John Berryman, Jean Stafford, Bernard Malamud, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott and William Golding.

He also authored The Education of an Editor, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1982), and A Deed of Death (1990), an investigation of the 1922 murder of the Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor.

Giroux received an honorary doctorate from Seton Hall University in 1999,[16] from Saint Peter's College/University in 2001,[17] the Mayoral Award of Honor for Art and Culture from the City of New York in 1989,[18] and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters from New York University in 1988.

Giroux died on September 5, 2008, at Seabrook Village, an independent-living center, in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, aged 94.