After my mother graduated high school, she started working at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, a publishing house in New York City. She worked for the same company until yesterday, when she retired from her job. It was an exciting, but emotional moment for her and for all those who worked with her over the years.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux was founded by Roger W. Straus. The firm is renowned for its international list of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux authors have won extraordinary acclaim over the years, including numerous National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and twenty-one Nobel Prizes in literature. Nobel Prize-winners include Knut Hamsun, Hermann Hesse, T. S. Eliot, Pär Lagerkvist, François Mauriac, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Salvatore Quasimodo, Nelly Sachs, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Czeslaw Milosz, Elias Canetti, William Golding, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Brodsky, Camilo José Cela, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney.
My mother started her job wearing cool glasses.Â
My mother is in back, smiling.
My mother in her newer glasses. Check out the “typewriter.”
The late Roger Straus, the founder of the FSG, and Jonathan Gallasi, current editor-in-chief and president of FSG.
My mother’s retirement brunch at the office.  Her hip glasses are on her head.
Now, she’s on to new adventures.
