The New York Times reported on Friday that Robert Giroux, an American book editor and publisher who was one of the partners of U.S. publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has died in Tinton Falls, New Jersey at the age of 94.

A niece of his reported that he died in his sleep at an independent-living facility. Among the authors he published let’s mention a few: Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag.

He edited Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott, Louise Bogan and William Golding. Moreover he’s to thank for George Orwell’s 1984 as well as for being T.S. Eliot’s American editor.

Many of his authors received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, and other prestigious literary awards.

His prizes and distinctions include: an honorary doctorate from Seton Hall University in 1999, the Mayoral Award of Honor for Art and Culture from the City of New York in 1989 the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters from New York University in 1988.

He began working as an editor in 1940 at Harcourt, Brace & Company and had so great a reputation that, when he left in 1955 because he had been fed up after, among other things, being forced to reject "Catcher in the Rye," to join what was then Farrar, Straus, more than a dozen writers followed him.

Mr. Giroux wrote several books himself, including "The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets" and "A Deed of Death: The Story behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor."