Robert Giroux is gone. We met at a party maybe ten years ago; we had both been editors of the Columbia Review while at school, so we compared notes—he said something funny about it that I can’t remember, but I do remember his graceful, easy manner and palpable intelligence. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt writes in the Times, “If the flamboyant Roger Straus presented the public face of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, presiding over the business end, Mr. Giroux made his mark on the inside, as editor in chief, shaping the house’s book list and establishing himself as the gold standard of literary taste.” What a palace of thought and beautiful design that man built.