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Who

The bespectacled, soft-spoken Galassi is the head of ultra-literary publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Backstory

The son of a lawyer in Boston, Galassi attended Philips Exeter Academy and Harvard (he edited the Harvard Lampoon and the Advocate and was classmates with Andrew Wylie) before earning a master's at Cambridge. After graduating in 1973, he got a job as a poetry editor at Houghton Mifflin, and was promoted to head of the company's New York office at age 30. He moved to Random House in 1981 (among his colleagues: future publishing superstar Gary Fisketjon) but five years later was sacked for his perceived lack of commercial acumen; supposedly the then-Random House publisher Howard Kaminsky called him a "6,000-copy editor," referring to the smallest possible print run. Kaminsky was proved wrong: Galassi became executive editor at FSG and soon acquired Scott Turow's legal thriller Presumed Innocent, which promptly sold 600,000 copies in hardback. Several promotions later, Galassi took over as president when FSG co-founder Roger Straus died in 2002. Today he continues to nurture the publisher's venerable standing with a mix of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry across four hardcover imprints—FSG, Faber & Faber, North Point, and Hill & Wang—and reports to John Sargent, CEO of FSG's parent company Macmillan (formerly Holtzbrinck).

Of note

FSG—which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2006—is one of New York's most prestigious literary houses, and has published no less than 20 Nobel Prize winners. Its authors include Graydon Carter, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Friedman, John McPhee, Richard Powers, Susan Sontag and, until recently, Tom Wolfe. (Back in the '80s, it was Wolfe's mega-advances that led to FSG losing long-time author Philip Roth: When his agent, Andrew Wylie, heard about the checks going to Wolfe, he demanded more money for Roth than FSG was willing to pay. Ironically, Wolfe himself defected to Little, Brown in late 2007 for the same reason.) But it's not all Nobels and Pulitzers at FSG: Galassi isn't above courting the wallets of the young and hip with books like Billy Corgan's poetry collection, Courtney Love's Diaries, and 2006's chick litty Rules for Saying Goodbye by Katherine Taylor. Nonetheless, Galassi retains a reputation as a highly discerning arbiter of literature; he once said that "most words put down on paper are not interesting, or don't make sense, or are stilted. You can tell within two pages that something is not going to work; 80 percent you can eliminate immediately."

On the side

Galassi—who was poetry editor of the Paris Review from 1978 to 1987—manages to find time for his passion, poetry: His own two volumes were published in 1988 and 2000; he translates poems from Italian (his grandfather was Italian, and as a student Galassi spent summers in Perugia), and is honorary chairman of the American Academy of Poets.

Personal

His wife, Susan Grace Galassi, is a curator at the Frick, and co-author of a book about Goya. The couple has two daughters—Isabel and Beatrice—and lives in Red Hook.