Robert Giroux - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

The youngest of five children, Giroux was born in Jersey City, New Jersey to Arthur J. Giroux, a foreman for a silk manufacturer, and Katharine Lyons Giroux, a grade-school teacher. Robert Giroux was one of five children: Arnold, Lester, Estele, Josephine and Robert, and grew up in the old Irish-Catholic West side of Jersey City. Both sisters left high school to work so that Giroux could pursue a higher education.

He attended Regis High School, across the Hudson River in Manhattan, but dropped out during the Depression, to take a job with local newspaper, the Jersey Journal (He eventually received his diploma 57 years later, in 1988.). Giroux received a scholarship to attend Columbia College of Columbia University, intending to study journalism. Soon, though, he found himself drawn towards literature. 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. "Imagine discovering a masterpiece..., as he later noted, "a great book is often ahead of its time, and the trick is how to keep it afloat until the times catch up with it". At Columbia, too, Giroux met a number of contemporaries who were destined for greatness in arts and letters, among them his classmate John Berryman, Herman Wouk, Thomas Merton, Ad Reinhardt, and John Latouche. In addition to writing film reviews for The Nation, Giroux became president of the Philolexian Society and editor of the literary magazine The Columbia Review, wherein he published some Berryman’s and Merton's earliest works. Upon graduating in 1936, he declined Van Doren's offer of a Kellett Fellowship at Cambridge University; the fellowship went to Berryman instead.