Thomas Merton and Robert Giroux: Correspondence
January 30th, 2015University of Notre Dame Press, 2015 |
An edition of letters between Thomas Merton and his longtime editor, Robert Giroux, was published in August 2015 by the University of Notre Dame Press, amidst celebrations marking the centennial of Merton’s birth. This new edition joins a raft of publications devoted to Merton and his work during the centennial. The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton, edited by Patrick Samway, SJ, chronicles one of the great literary friendships of the twentieth century. It includes letters dating as early as 1948, when Giroux, then a young editor at Harcourt, Brace, was preparing Merton’s first book, The Seven Storey Mountain, for publication. The phenomenal success of that memoir, completed soon after Merton joined the Trappist order, launched a career that led to more than two dozen books written by Merton and edited by Giroux. When Giroux moved to the firm then known as Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, he brought with him not only Merton but Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, and many other influential authors. In 1964, Giroux became a principal of the firm, known ever since as Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and remained active as editor-publisher until his death, in 2008.