When Philip Roth attended a drinks reception in 1989, he “discovered what it was like to be a pretty girl at a party”. Every time the celebrated American novelist turned around, “there was this guy,” he said years later.
This guy was the literary agent Andrew Wylie, aka “The Jackal”. Roth, though famous, had been getting a pittance for his books, and Wylie boasted that, if hired, he could get him $2mn for a three-book deal. Roth said yes, and his income skyrocketed.
Agents have been the focus of lots of literary gossip. Wylie famously poached Martin Amis from his longtime literary representative Pat Kavanagh, the wife of Julian Barnes, to the outrage of the literary world. Agents, such as the market-savvy Gal Aplanalp in Martin Amis’s novel The Information, have also occasionally become literary characters. But, according to Laura McGrath, nobody has yet written “a definitive account of the literary agent’s influence over American literature”.
An assistant professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, McGrath used her academic credentials and a book deal from Princeton University Press to convince agents — a secretive, cut-throat bunch — to open up. Still, McGrath, who is represented by the Gernert agency, conducted many of her interviews anonymously, using code names — rather funny for research into literary, as opposed to secret, agents.
McGrath’s subjects are the gatekeepers to the world of literature, able to make or break beginners, curate literary movements and even influence the topics chosen by overseas writers, who want to be published in America. They work closely with their writer clients, often editing their manuscripts and advising on plot.
But ultimately their role is to sell. There’s a lot of pleasure to be had from investigating ways in which literary art can be impacted by something so pedestrian as the market. Focusing on agents — rather than publishers, editors or reviewers — is a novel approach that gives the book a satisfying focus.
McGrath divides her argument into six agenting tools: The Pitch, The Debut, The Collection, The Lunch, The Advocate and The Export.
Literary agents have existed in the UK since the 1880s, but in the US, writers were still sending their books directly to publishers until the 1920s. The same still happens in continental Europe. But in the US most publishing houses now rely on agents, of whom there are over 1,500, to filter, to certify quality — and to pitch. The Pitch has become almost as important as the book itself.
As gatekeepers, agents have at times made history. In 1952, at the start of his agenting career, Sterling Lord met a writer with a second book to sell. The first one had been a flop, but Lord saw potential. Four years later, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road launched the Beat Generation on the popular scene. So different in style from the first one, which nobody remembered anyway, it was treated as his launch novel. Perhaps the most important phenomenon of modern publishing was created: The Debut.
In America or the UK, when a writer writes a novel, they send it to an agent. If the agent takes them on they will probably work with them on the draft, advise on plot and themes, and sometimes even line edit. Unlike many writers, they understand the industry and know what might sell and where. They work on the perfect pitch and send it to publishers. If a few bite, they organise an auction where, in exceptional cases, books can sell for six or even seven figures. Many also negotiate foreign rights. For their work, they take a cut of about 15 per cent. Some have become wildly rich, such as the late Christopher Little, the man whose agency discovered JK Rowling.
Today, one in five novels published is a debut. A “debut novelist without a track record has nothing but potential. Their track can only go up,” McGrath writes.
Publishers may pay a seven-figure advance — as Knopf did for Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) — for a leap into the unknown. In that case, the decision was vindicated: Gyasi’s book became a huge bestseller in the US.
But 60 per cent of debut writers never publish a second book. This can be down to agents pushing it too far in the first place: if debut sales do not deliver, a massive advance can end a writer’s career. The frenzy around debuts also perpetuates the over-representation of coming-of-age stories in American fiction.
Agents have curated entire genres. Lynn Nesbit was the guardian of the American short story by championing Donald Barthelme and John Cheever. Candida Donadio, a secretary and lacking higher education, discovered Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in the slush pile. She became so famous for her impeccable literary taste that editors sent her writers they felt incompetent to assess. One of them was the great postmodernist Thomas Pynchon.
Some agents, like Marie Brown, have championed Black writers, in an industry where minorities can struggle to be fairly represented, by creating a different public for them. Brown helped Terry McMillan, author of Waiting to Exhale (1992), become a number-one bestseller by encouraging her to find Black readers rather than pandering to the tastes of a mainstream white readership.
American agents have also impacted world literature. By assembling an international list that includes writers like Orhan Pamuk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Salman Rushdie — alongside the estates of figures like Jorge Luis Borges — Andrew Wylie has enmeshed himself in foreign markets. He has contributed to the boom of “universal” literature and work that is especially “representative” of its origin country, both genres created with an eye on multiple translations.
Extensively researched, Middlemen is at times overly academic and given to lengthy theories. Still, there is plenty here for readers curious about the sociology or economics of literature — or for those who just appreciate a bit of literary gossip.
Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction by Laura B McGrath Princeton University Press £25/$29.95, 296 pages