Author's split with longtime publisher unusual

NEW YORK — Roger Straus, the late founder and longtime leader of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, regarded his company as a family and liked to boast that "we publish authors, not books."

And what authors: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Susan Sontag, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott, all of whom stayed for decades, regardless of how many books they sold, or how much (or little) they were paid.

But now one Farrar star, who has praised Roger Straus for taking a chance on him when no one else would, is leaving after more than 40 years, millions of sales, numerous awards and countless controversies.

Tom Wolfe, the white-suited "New Journalist," satirist and fiction writer, ended his relationship with Farrar, Straus recently, signing with Little, Brown & Co. for a planned novel about Miami, "Back to Blood."

With sales for his most recent novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," well below those for his celebrated "The Bonfire of the Vanities," Wolfe and Farrar, Straus couldn't agree on terms for his next book. Wolfe wanted at least $5 million, more than Farrar was willing to risk.

"We have an old-fashioned model for publishing, which is to publish someone well and consistently for a long time," Farrar publisher Jonathan Galassi said. "That is a model that works well; it's when money rears its ugly head that you have a problem. And we had that with Tom."

Readers may not know, or care, whether an author sticks with Farrar, Straus or Little, Brown, but within the industry there is a long, proud history of writers who became inseparable from their publishers: John Steinbeck and Viking, William Styron and Random House, Ernest Hemingway and Scribner. Even Wolfe liked to call himself the "Cal Ripken" of the book world for his uninterrupted streak with Farrar, Straus — longer, he noted, than Steinbeck's time with Viking.

The business is far larger, more fickle and more impersonal than when Wolfe first joined Farrar, in 1965, but most of the major publishers still have a core of veteran authors who have stayed in one place: David McCullough and Mary Higgins Clark at Simon & Schuster, Maya Angelou and E.L. Doctorow at Random House, Russell Banks and Tony Hillerman at HarperCollins.

Longevity can be a story of personal or professional loyalty. At Grove/Atlantic, publisher Morgan Entrekin and author P.J. O'Rourke are so close that Entrekin served as best man at O'Rourke's wedding. Studs Terkel has a decades-long bond with New Press publisher Andre Schiffrin, as does Angelou with editor Bob Loomis. Wolfe worked for years at Farrar, Straus with editor Pat Strachan, who will again handle the author at Little, Brown.