Van Alen, and another $50,000 from others including Julius Fleischmann, whose family was famous for yeast and gin. The two began the firm of Farrar Straus & Co. on November 21, 1945. It was located in the naval office where Straus had served. They earned $200,000 in sales in their first year. Their first blockbuster was Gayelord Hauser's Look Younger, Live Longer, which was published in 1950 and eventually sold 600,000 copies. From 1948 to 1971, Farrar Straus acquired seven competitors including Hendricks House, Pellegrini & Cudahy, Noonday Press, and Hill & Wang. In 1950, stockholder Stanley Young was recognized when the company was renamed Farrar, Straus & Young. It was Farrar, Straus & Cudahy in 1953. In 1955, the company hired Editor-in-chief Robert Giroux away from rival Harcourt, Brace. He brought along no fewer than 15 authors including T. S. Eliot and Flannery O'Connor. The company became known as Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1964 with Giroux’s appointment as chairman of the board. 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. 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." In 1994, twenty years after his partner Farrar had died, Straus ceded control of the company to a German publishing conglomerate, Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the type of company he had long disdained and spoken out against. He reportedly made more than $30 million on the sale. Still, he continued to occupy a corner office at company headquarters until pneumonia put him in the hospital and ultimately caused his death in 2004. References 1917 births 2004 deaths 20th-century American Jews 21st-century American Jews American book publishing company founders Jewish American journalists American male journalists American