The translucent marble of Yale’s Beinecke Library both holds and hides many curious things, among them a sheaf of almost illegible letters from Henry James to J.B. Pinker, an Englishman who in 1898 had begun acting as his literary agent. It was a new profession, if that’s the right word, and its first member is commonly held to be Pinker’s competitor A.P. Watt, who opened up shop in 1875. Watt had Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, Pinker not only James but also Joseph Conrad. Many of James’s letters to Pinker are still unpublished, including the one he wrote on June 25, 1906—a letter that says a great deal about the way agents worked then, and in many ways now.
The novelist begins with a progress report. He had been busy all spring on what he called the New York Edition of his life’s work, and there’s a package in the mail with three hundred heavily revised pages of The Portrait of a Lady, first published in 1881; the rest will follow. The greater interest of the letter, however, lies in James’s reply to Pinker’s request for a favor. “I will,” he writes,
with pleasure send you an introduction to Mrs. Wharton (I in fact enclose one herein;) & I will also write to her telling her more in the same sense. But I’m sorry the question didn’t come up when she was in England (very briefly) a month ago—it could easily have led, no doubt, to your seeing her then (though I inferred the Macmillans were “after” her.) Also she isn’t an abundant or rapid producer (having £20,000 a year of her own!!) But herein is the letter.*
Pinker wants to build what everyone in the trade calls his “list,” his stable of clients, and the surest way to do that is to get a reference. Personal contact matters, always has and always will. He needs James to vouch for him, to let Edith Wharton know that she won’t be sorry to put her business in his hands, even after he’s taken the then-customary 10 percent. But the long-established house of Macmillan was “after” her. The House of Mirth had been a great best seller the year before, and the firm wanted to sign her up, to cut out the interference of people like Pinker and Watt. Most publishers of the day saw agents as by definition disreputable, and in Middlemen the Temple University professor Laura McGrath quotes the self-interested 1897 judgment of William Heinemann, who had brought out several of James’s books. To him the literary agent was a “parasite,” indeed nothing more than “a canker…eating itself into the very heart” of what ought to be the “mutual interests” of two gentlemen, the one who wrote and the one who brought that writing into the world.
James had been stiffed by publishers often enough to know better; Wharton was both luckier and tougher. Macmillan did get her, as Scribner’s had in the United States, yet she negotiated fiercely on her own behalf and even busied herself with the advertising of her books. And of course James was wrong about her. She was already in her forties, but her career was just starting, and despite that enviable private fortune she proved almost as “abundant and rapid” a producer as he was. She published twelve books in the 1920s alone, earning enormous sums from both magazine serials and hardback sales, and spent every penny of it. She would have made Pinker much more than James ever did, and meanwhile the agent’s other star, Conrad, was thousands of pounds in debt to him.
Few agents today would act as their clients’ private bankers, but Pinker’s investment in Conrad did eventually pay off. In his last decade the former sea captain found an unexpected commercial success, and the agent was rewarded for having kept faith with his own sense of literary worth, his own taste in a profession where “taste is everything.” Or almost everything. There’s also what McGrath calls “market savvy,” and a blend of the two is what makes “books, careers, canons.” Pinker had that as well; it’s why he asked James for that introduction. He thought Wharton would make money, and that’s still what agents want, good books that make money, though now the introductions usually go the other way, with young and sometimes desperate writers begging their friends and teachers for a reference. Who is your agent, and can I use your name in writing to her?
These days the middleman is almost always female, as McGrath writes in her ironically titled first book, though that’s not the only irony here. No contemporary publisher would refuse to deal with an agent, and yet in general parlance middlemen still don’t have a good reputation. They may not be cankers, but they remain people one speaks of wanting to cut out, proverbially sharp and cynical dealers who bollix up the food chains of commerce and culture alike and get in the way of any direct relation between producer and consumer. McGrath sees it very differently: this particular kind of middleman is necessary, and there are a lot of great books we wouldn’t have without them. “No figure,” she writes, “has been more significant, and yet more invisible” in the “ecosystem” of contemporary American fiction, and her shrewd, scholarly, and generous work shows why.
The first American literary agent was Paul Revere Reynolds, a descendant of the silversmith. In McGrath’s words Reynolds “inaugurated a grand tradition: he became an agent accidentally,” stumbling into the field because “he wanted to be around books.” He began as a publisher’s representative in the 1890s, selling the American rights to British books, and then slid over into hawking a few writers on his own, “placing their work in the mass circulation magazines for a small fee.” His most important clients were probably Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but he earned the bulk of his living from the stories and serials by other writers that he sold to those magazines, and Middlemen’s first chapter begins by quoting a 1927 letter to George Lorimer, the editor of The Saturday Evening Post. Here it is in its entirety:
I am enclosing a novel by Henry Kitchell Webster entitled The Man With the Scarred Hand. I will sell you the serial rights for $30,000.
That’s it. Author, title, price. But then Reynolds knew the market and the market knew him. His word was trusted, and while Webster is now entirely forgotten, he was a recognized figure of the day, even if the Post does not, in this case, appear to have bitten. McGrath begins here because Reynolds’s letter stands as the most naked form of what, in the title to that first chapter, she calls “The Pitch”; her later chapters all use a similar form—“The Debut,” “The Export,” and of course “The Lunch.” The price wouldn’t be stated today, not at first; still, those essentials remain at the heart of any transaction between agent and publisher, and so does that market knowledge in the form of individual editors’ tastes and preferences. What the rest of “The Pitch” shows, however, is just how much the agent’s work has changed.
For one thing, agents now edit. Reynolds probably never touched a line of Cather’s, and not because she was a great writer already; it simply wasn’t his job. Today a lucky young novelist may secure representation on the basis of a draft or a few stories in a quarterly. But even after that agreement is struck the writer typically needs to do one version after another of a novel before the agent feels ready to send it out. The middle sags, this character’s motivation is unclear, and have you thought about the first person? That can happen at any stage of a career, but many debut novels in particular undergo a process of development akin to that of a play or a TV show, and the bulk of that work happens not in the offices of Knopf or Doubleday but in a series of drafts produced for the agent’s eyes alone. Reports of the death of in-house editing have been greatly exaggerated, but as one unnamed agent told McGrath, there’s now an expectation that anything a publisher sees “will be closer to finished than not.”
In part that comes from the peculiar pressures the publishing industry puts on first novels. The “debut” is a particular category that McGrath traces back to the agent Sterling Lord, who along with the editor Malcolm Cowley so successfully talked up Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) that they created what we now call “buzz,” a sense of excitement that started years before the novel’s actual sale. Debuts are bright shiny objects, they introduce the writer to literary society, and editors chase them because, well, you never know. That book set in brownstone Brooklyn could be this year’s The Secret History. So they overpay for them, which makes respectable sales seem flat, and in consequence, McGrath writes, 60 percent of first-time novelists never publish a second. That says as much about American publishing in general as it does about the work of agents in particular, and Middlemen provides a superb introduction to the industry. But for the agent the chance of a big initial payment seems to warrant all that pre-submission work.
A second way that the agent’s work has changed is the kind of letter she writes once a book seems ready to go. McGrath quotes from one, a redacted eight-paragraph email—name, title, and plot summary removed—whose length and detail would have baffled Reynolds, and then she performs a skilled close reading of what this particular and anonymous agent has said without saying. The letter convinces. It avoids superlatives while conveying the agent’s sense of the book’s potential, detailing the author’s previous record in order to suggest that this one could be both a best seller and a prizewinner. It was a letter written by “this agent” for this book, and it turned out to be right. Her taste synced with her market savvy, and though the novel was bought at auction for a “modest sum,” it then sold over a million copies, won awards, and was translated into over thirty languages. McGrath knows its name but isn’t saying; readers will want to guess, as I did.
Middlemen is studded with such moments. Some are bits of fact: the first book auction was run by Scott Meredith in 1952, though not even he could later remember just what book he sold that way. Others take the form of narrative, a series of interviews or scenes: the Frankfurt Book Fair, tea in a Harlem brownstone, or a Zoom meeting at which McGrath listened to the agents at a firm she calls “Opus” discuss what they’ve found in the slush pile, winnowing over nine hundred unsolicited submissions down to half a handful of new clients. Those are enormous odds, but McGrath is impressed by the seriousness with which the Opus agents have done their job, by the confidence of their judgments, and by their continued passion for literature itself. This, she admits, surprised her, for she began her project
steeped in the tired academic generalization—that those who work in publishing are the English majors who couldn’t hack it in academia or those who cared more about money…. These stereotypes could not have been farther from the truth.
Some of Middlemen’s most interesting pages lie in the afterword, in which McGrath details both her use of statistics and the process of her research. Agents and editors each like what they already know, and the work that appeals to them too often reflects their own demographic. Here the interesting figure isn’t that in 2023 “73.7 percent of literary agents self-identified as white” but that “between 2000 and 2022, more novels were set in New York City than in the other top thirty most populous cities in the United States combined.” As for the research, McGrath notes that one of her initial problems was simply “convincing agents to speak to me.” She was just a graduate student at work on a dissertation—someone with no professional standing. Then she realized that she could get an interview by using the same method that many young novelists do: asking her writer friends for introductions and dropping the “names of mutuals.” It worked; among other things, it helped her secure an agent of her own. But something else helped more, for McGrath writes with a deft and dust-free feeling for scene and character that is matched by the depth and clarity of her analysis.
“The Lunch” begins with Candida Donadio, who one day picked up a rejected manuscript at the small agency where she worked as a secretary, and something hit. Call it taste or even instinct, but whatever it was, she had it, a feel for the books that were, as one editor put it, “going to make a difference in literary culture.” This one used a scrambled narrative sequence to describe the experiences of a World War II bombardier. It was called Catch-18, and she sold it to a young editor, Simon and Schuster’s Robert Gottlieb, for a then-standard $1,500. The book needed so much revision that today it might not have made it out an agency’s door, but Gottlieb was willing to work with Joseph Heller on trimming out more than 150 pages. There was no question, at the time, of Donadio doing that herself, though she may have come up with the title by which the book has been known for almost seventy years; she and Gottlieb could never agree about that.
The story behind Catch-22 (1961) is a twice-told tale at least; what’s fresh here is the way McGrath begins with the person in the middle. She makes it a different story by shifting its point of view, putting the agent at its center, not the author or editor. The book was Donadio’s first sale, and it established her as someone who could see promise where others saw incoherence; it’s no surprise that a colleague then sent her Thomas Pynchon, describing him as either crazy or a genius. But the chapter is called “The Lunch” because that’s precisely where she did so much of her work, making deals, sharing gossip, sniffing out new clients, generating the buzz that still lubricates the industry today. McGrath goes to one such lunch, at the Midtown Manhattan restaurant Michael’s, on the former site of the Italian Pavilion where Donadio had her regular table. This one is between a midlevel editor and a midlevel agent, both unnamed, and it’s not especially consequential. Still, they like and are useful to each other, and they also act as McGrath’s native informants, introducing her to the codes and rituals of their world. No business before drinks—that used to be the rule, anyway, but times have changed, and McGrath ends by noting that at this particular meal “no martinis were consumed.”
The journalistic ease of these pages is enormous fun, but a chapter called “The Advocate” proves more incisive, attuned as it is to the publishing industry’s blind spots about Black readers and writers. McGrath begins here with the agent Marie Brown. As another young woman starting out in the 1960s, she moved to Doubleday from a job developing curricula for Philadelphia public schools and then, like Reynolds, became an agent by accident when a friend asked her to help sell a biography of Diana Ross. Most publishers “treated Black readers as a monolith” and didn’t know how to target books for particular audiences within that larger community, as they did for white readers. They offered large advances in the hopes that a novelist would be the next Toni Morrison or Alice Walker and almost never followed through to help that writer build a career. Brown wanted to change that; for one thing, she knew that many Black readers bought their books at the kinds of stores, “street-corner book stalls” included, whose sales weren’t counted for the New York Times best-seller list. She worked the figures, and her writers got better deals because of it.
A third such woman stands at the head of “The Collection,” in a way that makes Middlemen’s central chapters into the portrait of a generation. Lynn Nesbit, an assistant to Sterling Lord, picked up a short story in 1961 that her boss couldn’t be bothered with. It was by Donald Barthelme, whose work she soon began to place in The New Yorker, and yet for an agent short stories present a problem. They have an inescapable position in American literary history, going back to Hawthorne and Poe, and collections of them often figure on the short lists for major prizes. It’s also what most young writers begin with and the staple of the MFA workshop, that prose equivalent of the life-drawing class. The difficulty is that the short story’s cultural value outstrips its market presence, and they are now almost impossible to sell. The well-paid magazine world on which Reynolds depended is gone, leaving not much more than The New Yorker and The Atlantic, with young writers largely relegated to the quarterlies. In consequence a collection of stories is “the most difficult sale an agent can make,” so difficult that an agent who can sell such a volume earns a considerable “symbolic reward.” She is “the agents’ agent,” someone whose peers see her as “the most skilled businesswoman with the most refined of literary taste.” Someone, McGrath suggests, like Nesbit, who is still working in her eighties, and whose client list eventually included Shirley Hazzard and Ann Beattie.
Middlemen has a few blind spots of its own, and the major one lies in its avoiding much sustained discussion of more commercial or genre fiction. McGrath’s focus is on the frankly canonical end of things, on Kerouac and Morrison, Pynchon and Colson Whitehead, the books that get taught and have some chance of being read in the future. That’s refreshing, but it also raises questions about the way an agent’s job is affected by such hierarchies of taste. Does Nicole Aragi’s work for her client Whitehead differ from what the agents for such regular best sellers as Nora Roberts or Michael Connelly do for them? Maybe it doesn’t; I’d still like to know. How does an agent negotiate a multibook deal, as is common with mysteries, a deal that usually includes a set of ongoing characters? What influence do they have in the world of celebrity book clubs, with Oprah or Reese Witherspoon or Jenna Bush Hager? But my raising those questions is really a mark of Middlemen’s strength. It’s a way of saying that I wish it were longer.
Two widely influential books lie behind McGrath’s, each an account of the networks and institutions that help determine what kind of fiction we read. One is Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), which examines the causes and consequences of the university’s ever-increasing involvement in the production of literature; the other is James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005), with its focus on the mechanisms of reception. McGrath quotes from the latter at the start of her afterword and notes that when she began she had only the vaguest idea of “what it might mean to do literary sociology.” At first she thought that knowing what agents did might shape her reading of the books they sold, with her interviews intended as a preliminary step to a more conventional analysis. Then she discovered that it was “almost impossible to find a rigorous accounting of what, exactly, agents did all day,” and at that point her interviews became her primary texts. She conducted “hundreds of hours” of them with almost eighty different agents and worked through her transcripts to produce a thick description of the profession itself. That included a “number of on-the-record” conversations with figures like Nesbit and Brown, and Middlemen ends with one more of them.
Agents don’t often make headlines. Andrew Wylie does, going back to the mid-1990s, when he got Martin Amis to leave his previous agent and employ him instead. That made his name, and also his nickname. Both publishers and other agents started to call him “the Jackal,” someone always sniffing around other people’s writers, as though they were prey, while the publisher Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux referred to him as “simply, ‘that shit’”—terms that remind me of the way Victorians like Heinemann saw Pinker. But to McGrath that reputation is the “least interesting” thing about him, and what matters more is his belief that literature, great literature, is something that should be paid for. Literary value should be rewarded with monetary value, as if there were indeed some equivalence between taste and the market. McGrath’s chapter on Wylie is called “The Export” and begins with his 1989 pursuit of Philip Roth. Wylie signed him by showing him just how much money he was losing by letting Farrar, Straus and Giroux handle his foreign rights and sell his books abroad in a series of loose and unremunerative gentlemen’s agreements. Roth at that point had written fourteen novels, available in thirty different countries or territories, which “amounted to 420 potential contracts to be renegotiated every 7 years.” If it was all properly run, Wylie argued, the writer’s income might jump by a factor of five.
For McGrath that concentration on foreign rights means that Wylie was playing an entirely “different game than most agents.” He was betting on the backlist, “on long-term sales and canonicity rather than the short-term gains of the bestseller,” and it eventually gave him a roster of international stars. He had Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Susan Sontag, the Nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk and Gabriel García Márquez, and the estates of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. At the same time the sales of American literature abroad exploded, and McGrath here points as well to the international sensation of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1988), whose enormous success in translation depended in part on the canniness of her agent, Sandra Dijkstra. Publishing is one area where the United States runs a trade surplus. Paris bookstore tables are filled with American titles, but a French writer almost has to win the Nobel Prize to gain any traction here, while the international stature of figures like Pamuk or Elena Ferrante is in large part a consequence of their earlier reception in English. New York and London are now the international switchyards where the goods of one country, one language, are trundled off to another.
Or are they? One of the great paradoxes of contemporary publishing is that much of its business is done in Germany. McGrath tracks Wylie to what might be called his native habitat, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and finds him an expectedly warm and engaging subject. He’s a busy man, however, and she spends much of her three days in Frankfurt talking to other agents and foreign rights specialists and coming away with a renewed respect for the skill with which they match particular books to particular publishers. And at the end she returns to her own literary training with a brief close reading of the novel that gave Roth a renewed international presence. American Pastoral (1997) might look too provincial to travel, with its evocation of “prom, baseball, football, and cheerleaders,” and yet that’s precisely what made it so appealing to an audience abroad. The Jewish American athlete called “the Swede” became a synecdoche for the country as a whole, and in those post–cold war days Roth seemed to speak for America to a world that wanted to know ever more about it.
Would he have written it without Wylie’s ministrations? Probably, and I’d be surprised if the agent touched a line of it. But would he be in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, with three volumes and counting, if Wylie hadn’t shown him a few “back-of-napkin calculations”? Maybe not, or not yet. An agent like Wylie or Nesbit is in a sense both a book’s first buyer and its first seller, and their intuition about the relation of “form and finance” and what “the market might favor, sustain, or reject has significant consequences for the literature that we read.” That’s “not bad for a ‘middleman,’” as McGrath writes in conclusion, and nor is Middlemen itself, not bad, not bad at all.
English (US) · 