He was put to work in the Magazine and Book Section of the Navy Office of Public Relations in New York, with his friend James Van Alen.

Straus borrowed $30,000 against his inheritance, $70,000 from his Navy co-worker Van Alen, and another $50,000 from others including Julius Fleischmann, whose family was famous for yeast and gin.

From 1948 to 1971, Farrar Straus acquired seven competitors including Hendricks House, Pellegrini & Cudahy, Noonday Press, and Hill & Wang.

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.

[3] His dedication to the publishing business earned him several Nobel Prize-winning authors, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Czesław Miłosz and T. S. Eliot, and Pulitzer Prize authors such as Robert Lowell, John McPhee, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud.

The FSG brand became so renowned that author Scott Turow turned down a $350,000 advance from a rival publisher for his first novel, Presumed Innocent, so that he could work with Straus, who offered him $200,000.

John McPhee speaking at Straus's memorial service said of him, "He was there in my thirties, forties, fifties and sixties, and was still leading me up the street on a leash when I entered my seventies.