Robert Giroux, 94, long a partner in the publishing house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and lauded by many as the finest editor in America of his generation, died last week in Tinton Falls, N.J.

Throughout the 1980s, he was an annual summer visitor to the home of Yvette Eastman in Aquinnah. With friends, he also rented a house of his own one summer there.

Among writers whose work he had published were T.S. Eliot, George Orwell. Robert Graves. E.M. Forster, Jack Kerouac, Robert Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Bernard Malamud and Flannery O’Connor. A famous work that got away — but not of his own choosing — was J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

In a Gazette interview in 1985, Mr. Giroux reminisced about writers he had known, artistic energy, and William Shakespeare, about whom he had written a book of his own.

He also compared the Vineyard and Nantucket, where he had also summered, with the Vineyard coming out distinctly the winner — “less flat, more trees.”

Born in New Jersey in 1914, Mr. Giroux had attended Columbia University with an eye to becoming a journalist. He changed his mind under the influence of English scholar Mark Van Doren and became a major in English and comparative literature. But he did become the editor of the Columbia Review while he was in college, publishing — among others — early works of fellow students, the poet John Berryman and the religious philosopher Thomas Merton, he recalled.

Since Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain became a bestseller, that led Mr. Giroux to note that there really is no way of predicting what will be a bestseller and to add that they tend not to be long-lived.

“Who remembers Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Jean Stratton Porter’s The Girl of the Limberlost or Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur today?” he asked. But he remarked that, as an editor and publisher, he did have a way of deciding whether to gamble on a writer.

”First of all, of course, you have to read what an author is offering you. But then, if you like it, you want to meet the writer because creativity is very much involved with energy. When I met Flannery O’Connor, I thought, here is a writer who will follow through — who has great energy — and so we published Wise Blood.”

Despite his youthful editing at Columbia and his enthusiasm for literature, Bob Giroux did start out in journalism, at radio station CBS. The years were 1938 and 1939 and Edward R. Murrow, William L. Shirer and H.V. Kaltenborn were broadcasting on events in Austria and Munich. Bob Giroux recognized that their reports were current history and put them all together as a book to be sent out as CBS publicity. The book caught the attention of a Harcourt Brace editor and it wasn’t long before young Giroux had left CBS to become an editor at Harcourt Brace.

It was there that he and T.S. Eliot became friends, when the young editor was called upon to substitute for a senior editor who couldn’t take Eliot to lunch because of a previous engagement. But it was also there that he lost the chance to publish Catcher in the Rye.

As the incident is recounted in a new book on the golden age of American publishers, editors and authors by Al Silverman, Salinger had come to Mr. Giroux with the manuscript half finished, and on the basis of a recommendation by William Shawn of The New Yorker, Mr. Giroux had promised he would print it. But, as it turned out, his word was not the final one. He was still a young, striving editor. His boss told him to turn it over to the textbook division of the company since it was about going to prep school. The textbook department knew it wasn’t for them, and Harcourt lost out.

But many more successes than failures marked Bob Giroux’s publishing career.

He told the Gazette that he felt that there was more creative writing talent at work in America in the 1980s than there had been in a very long time, but that the reading public was unreliable.

“Our culture has become illiterate. Our movies are aimed at 12-year-old minds . . . There’s been a deterioration of standards in the school and the family. Trash is inundating everything. On the other hand, there will always be some people who won’t put up with junk, and that, I think, is where a company like ours comes in. We don’t care about names. We’re a literary publisher.” (Although the company is now owned by Macmillan, it continues to consider itself a literary publisher.)

Since he was on the Vineyard that is sometimes considered the site of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and since he was the author of The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Mr. Giroux also decried as nonsense the idea that the works of Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare. Sir Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford and Christopher Marlowe are among those who have been proposed as the true playwright.

“But to me all that has its basis in the absurd idea that only a highly educated, aristocratic person could have written the Shakespearian plays because they’re about kings. But they’re not only about kings. The rest of the work is about Falstaff and Puck and earthy types that no aristocrat could have known,” he said.

Mr. Giroux’s Island visits always included long days of beach and water at Squibnocket and dining with literary friends of Mrs. Eastman’s. He and she and Charles Reilly, a friend who often came to the Island with him, were sometimes dinner guests of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, herself an editor at Doubleday, and a great admirer of Mr. Giroux.