Middlemen by Laura B McGrath — literature’s power brokers

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Middlemen by Laura B McGrath — literature’s power brokers

An insider’s look at publishing argues that literary agents have shaped genres, global reputations and the economics of modern fiction

American literary agent Andrew Wylie, known as ‘the Jackal’ © Corbis via Getty Images

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 TheInformation, 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

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1. Alex Petkas further contends that the end of such reading was not for the goal of being “well read” but to provide models of greatness that one would imitate. Alongside the tradition Petkas identifies as one of imitating greatness, there is, nonetheless, a strong pedagogical tradition of reading for moral formation. See Alex Petkas, “Great Books Is for Losers,” The American Mind, November 18, 2024, https://americanmind.org/salvo/great-books-is-for-losers/. ↩

2. Books, like many other things — technologies, vocations, legacies, places, forms of government — have complicated histories that shape how and why they endure. Consider, for example, the case that Rory Groves makes on the connection between the irreplaceability of the human element, trades that have survived the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, and the possibility of stewarding a family economy. Rory Groves, Durable Trades: Family-Centered Economies That Have Stood the Test of Time (Front Porch Republic, 2020). ↩

3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., (Verso, 2006). Anderson emphasizes shared reading cultures as historically shaping how people imagine themselves connected to others — either historically or geographically. ↩

4. For example, the Iliad and Odyssey as Ancient Greek classics influenced the literary shape of Virgil’s Latin Aeneid as well as John Milton’s English Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost, in turn, set the basic narrative trajectories for C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra. Perelandra has a greater chance, therefore, of being remembered as a “classic” insofar as it participates in a literary tradition much longer and larger than itself; Lewis’s sci-fi novel “married in” as it were to the big Greek, Italian, English literary family. ↩

5. We use the term “genre” to describe literary works when they are grouped according to their kinds. ↩

6. John Bunyan, “The Author’s Apology for His Book,” Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Cynthia Wall (Norton, 2008). ↩

7. Franz Kafka, “To Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904,” in Letters to Friends, Family and Editors (Knopf Doubleday, 2013), 16. It is from this quotation that Ben Palpant has titled his recent compilation of interviews with poets. See Ben Palpant, An Axe for a Frozen Sea: Conversations with Poets About What Matters Most (Rabbit Room, 2025). ↩

8. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Norton, 2016). ↩

9. Jacques Maritain insists that the poetic mode (i.e., story making as an art form) is distinct from a philosophical mode because of its emphasis on making — as in its Greek root poiein, “to make.” Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism (Notre Dame, 1974), 23. ↩

10. In his Poetics, one of Aristotle’s unities for narrative forms like drama is the unity of time in which the action occurs. See Aristotle, “Section V,” in Poetics, trans. S.H. Butcher (Cosimo Classics, 2008), also available as a free e-book from Project Gutenberg. ↩

11. C.S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 1970). ↩

12. Lewis is hardly original in distinguishing analytical knowledge from experiential, immersive, or poetic. His contemporaries — Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, and Michael Polanyi — all differentiate and articulate kinds of knowing. Pieper distinguishes “ratio” (ratiocination) from “intellectus” (contemplative thought), Polanyi “tacit knowledge” from “propositional knowledge,” and Maritain the “metaphysical” (philosophical) from the “poetic.” Most recently Iain McGilchrist has mapped these two epistemological modes onto the two spheres of the brain. See Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale, 2012). Although none of these ways of knowing maps directly on to Lewis’s analytical vs. immersive mode, they generally rhyme as categories, particularly if we consider the philosophical mode as a more robust analytical mode than the modern materialist analytical mode, which asks only the efficient cause (what puts what into motion) and its material cause (what is something made of), leaving out formal and final causes. See Joseph Minich, Enduring Divine Absence: The Challenge of Modern Atheism(Davenant, 2018). ↩

13. Lewis, “Meditation,” 215 (emphasis original). ↩

14. See Andy Naselli, How to Read a Book (Canon, 2024) 28–29; John Piper, “Appendix 2,” in Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Crossway, 2010), 205–10. ↩

15. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” underscores the connection between witnessing a thing in its glory and the possibility of coming to know it. See Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford, 2009), 129. ↩

16. Flannery O’Connor. Quoted in Jonathan Rogers, The Terrible Speed of Mercy (Thomas Nelson, 2012), 132. ↩

17. Edmund Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh,” in Faerie Queene Book I, ed. Carol Kaske (Hackett, 2006), 205–8. ↩

18. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” 215. ↩

19. Bunyan, “The Author’s Apology for His Book.” ↩

20. See George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (Random House, 2021), 85. ↩

21. Because Van Engen distinguishes between two modes of reading poems and sequences them — he invites readers into the “experience” of the poem; then, as desired, he welcomes them to “discuss it” (or analyze it) — I really appreciate the reformation of reading poetry that he offers. But I find Van Engen close to overstating his thesis in his desire to correct: The book’s primary claim is to enjoy poetry immersively as a first-order priority as he moderates a cultural obsession over reading poetry “first” and “only miserabl[y]” for its meaning. (See Word Made Fresh, 70–75.) Nonetheless, in his helpfully revised priorities, he can verge on dismissing the analytical as optional. If the two modes of knowing are complementary and come at the activity of knowing differently, it seems fair to suggest that they might serve one another in a positive flywheel. Van Engen returns to the relationship between experiencing and analyzing a poem often in his close readings of poems. For example, in his discussion of William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say,” he insists, “By design, [the poem] can be enjoyed without any need to discuss it. The discussion adds to the enjoyment without supplanting, replacing, or judging, or demeaning an initial encounter with the poem” (75). Or, similarly, “Structure deepens our reading; for it develops our understanding, but poetry can be appreciated without stopping to study it. Take up these deepened readings only when and as you desire. Remember, you can always water-ski across the surface of a poem and wave at the author on the shore. Shallows can refresh as much as depths” (135). “As much as” is a strong claim, but he balances this “optional” approach to analysis by offering generous new tools, like “erasing” to help you concentrate on how different parts of speech move the poem forward.