Farrar, Straus and Company was founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus and John C. Farrar. In 1964 Robert Giroux's name was added to the roster and the company became Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 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-two 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, Seamus Heaney, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Poetry has always played a pivotal role on the Farrar, Straus and Giroux list, which boasts some of the greatest names in modern verse, ranging from Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin to John Ashbery, Thom Gunn, and Les Murray.

Fiction has an even greater international reach, distinguished by Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Franzen, Peter Høeg, Amitav Ghosh, Roberto Bolaño, Denis Johnson, Jamaica Kincaid, Marilynne Robinson, Bernard Malamud, Alice McDermott, Péter Nádas, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Richard Powers,
Susan Sontag, Scott Turow, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Tom Wolfe.

History, art history, natural history, current affairs and science round out a strong list in nonfiction represented by Thomas Friedman, Philip Gourevitch, George Packer, Alex Ross, Michael Holroyd, William Langewiesche, Gina Kolata, Louis Menand, and John McPhee, among others.