ALL LITERARY AGENTS are liars. I am a literary agent.
A paradox both animates and undermines Laura B. McGrath’s Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, her attempt to execute the most complete portrait yet of our profession and its undersung role in literary history. While she draws upon stray papers in disparate archives, industry publications, biographies, memoirs, and her own quantitative analyses, the bulk of her book’s data set is her interviews with more than seventy-five working agents, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity. Take “Mark.” Early on, McGrath asks the well-established agent if he has “any strategies especially successful for pitching short story collections.” Pleasantly, Mark replies: “I don’t have any, Laura. It really all depends on the book, and on the author.” McGrath pushes; Mark holds.
To explain what’s happening when a man claims to have no tips for doing a job at which he’s manifestly successful, McGrath invokes the Thomas theorem, a foundational sociological principle from 1928: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” “Whether or not Mark’s statement is true is less important to me than his belief in, and his reliance on, that statement,” she writes, “and what it can tell us about the profession and contemporary literature.” McGrath ends the section: “What agents say does not need to be true in order to be illustrative. I believe that Mark believes that he doesn’t have any strategies—but I do not believe that there are no strategies.”
These acrobatic hermeneutics rather obscure the scale of McGrath’s next leap. Agents are by trade unreliable narrators; yet for her account of their contribution to American letters, McGrath relies almost exclusively upon them. Does Mark really believe, as McGrath allows, that he has no strategies? Don’t get me wrong: I can appreciate William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas as much as the next guy, but both Epimenides’s paradox and Occam’s razor feel more apt here. A simpler explanation: Mark is full of shit.
MIDDLEMEN’S OPENING LINE is its argument: “No figure has been more significant, and yet more invisible, in American literature than the literary agent.” Right away, we have what I tell my writers are the preconditions for a good nonfiction book. You need to be able to answer “yes” to the following two questions. Can you state the thesis of the book in a sentence? Check. Is that thesis something not everyone would agree with? Check. More than a few editors and publishers might quibble with McGrath’s assertion—and, given the placement of those two commas, probably some writers, too. But let’s not get bogged down in elements of style. The point is: provocation is good!
McGrath goes on to elaborate that her “aim in Middlemen is to provide a new context for understanding major postwar American authors—to uncover the practices and consequences of gatekeeping, and to account for poorly understood or largely unexplained literary phenomena and the literary networks that produce them.” Her endeavor falls into a field of study broadly known as the sociology of literature or culture, its lineage including the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova, as well as James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige (2005), Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009), John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture (2010), Clayton Childress’s Under the Cover (2017), and Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction (2023). Bourdieu, Casanova, and Moretti are the most internationally known, but it was McGurl who inaugurated an influential institution-first approach to postwar American literary studies, clear from his titular subversion of Hugh Kenner’s great-man theory of impact, The Pound Era. In essence, these works propose to deemphasize the author as the locus of creation, subordinating her importance to the superstructure sustaining the author function—institutions and industries, yes, but also informal social/professional networks and literal, symbolic, and cultural capital. On an interpretive level, the author’s work can then be read as dramatizing the forces that produced it. A former associate director of the Stanford Literary Lab, which Moretti cofounded, McGrath extends the sociological approach to literary agents, whose complex role in the system, aside from one chapter in Thompson’s Merchants of Culture and another in Childress’s Under the Cover, has not yet been the object of serious study.
McGrath explains that her title is in part a hat-tip to the 1972 memoir The Middle Man by Paul Revere Reynolds, whose father, Paul Sr., is considered the first literary agent in the United States, having started his firm in 1893. (It is also intended as an ironic nod to the fact that most literary agents are not, and almost never have been, men at all; the business is around 80 percent women.) Among the first to employ the term when referring to agents was the British publisher William Heinemann, in a broadside against the profession published the same year Reynolds Sr. opened up shop: “This is the age of the middleman,” he laments, before letting fly more colorful descriptions of our kind, notably “canker” and “parasite.” Curiously, McGrath neither quotes Heinemann’s reference to the middleman nor his diagnosis of the fundamental problem with agents. I have to imagine some publishers—despite how much has changed in the intervening hundred and thirty years or so—would find it resonant today. “On the one hand,” he writes, “every author is warned against making permanent contracts with publishers, and that certainly with more than a shade of justification; on the other hand, the moment the publisher has succeeded in launching an author successfully, the moment he has taken risks upon himself—risks sometimes which very few men in other businesses would take, considering the proportion of profit to be gained—the parasite steps in, and, by pitting one publisher against the other, squeezes out, over and above what the publisher is justified in giving the author, an absolutely illegitimate profit for himself.” (Naturally, I protest.)
McGrath confesses that she, too, held a dim view of agents before she began working on Middlemen, imagining that the “women are sour, shrewish types who chain-smoke; the men have winning smiles and a tendency to yell.” I was relieved to learn she had found that “these stereotypes could not have been further from the truth.” If anything, her subjects come off almost suspiciously well.
So, what makes literary agents so significant? And so invisible? The second issue forms a formidable obstacle to McGrath’s attempt to tackle the first. That cloak of invisibility is a by-product of historical and historiographical factors—including a paucity of well-preserved primary documents, sexist oversight, the lack of any standardized training program with an attendant curriculum to study—as well as a feature by design. Within the industry, it’s in no one’s interests (ours included) to emphasize the role of the agent in literary production. Hence the challenge of McGrath’s project, and the oddness of her decision to take so much straight from the trickster’s mouth. There’s no question that the middleman Hermes could offer excellent insight into the delivery of messages, but surely the gods and mortals would be important resources, too.
Legendary agent Amanda “Binky” Urban tells McGrath in an email that “agents are like small children, they should be seen and not heard.” It’s a great line, and one McGrath underscores as an example of the agent’s tendency to recess. But I can’t help wondering if Urban said this cheekily, in declining to go on record for a longer interview. Like Mark’s I don’t have any, Laura, there’s some truth here, and more trickery. Sure, agents avoid taking credit for what they do for their authors. But as a matter of business, they absolutely do need to be heard and seen as powerful entities by both prospective writers and publishers. That’s the brand. Urban knows when to step out of the shadows, as noted by Sinykin in Big Fiction. In the run-up to the publication of her client Bret Easton Ellis’s third and most controversial novel, American Psycho, Urban told The New York Times that when the manuscript first landed at Simon & Schuster, “there was some feeling of revulsion on the part of some of the younger women there.” Some of the top brass shared the sentiment, and Simon & Schuster soon canceled the book. Who could dream of better press than that? Within forty-eight hours, Urban had resold it to Sonny Mehta at Random House. The National Organization for Women called for a boycott of Mehta’s imprints, Knopf and Vintage, and Urban’s entire client roster was “heavily monitored” in what NOW called “Binky Watch.” Needless to say, American Psycho was a major success for all involved.
Still, there’s no denying that we agents are the shadiest of all the characters inside the black, or at least opaque, box of publishing. The agent is the one species in the ecosystem whose taxonomic name refuses to clearly define what she does. In the world of books, writers write, editors edit, publishers publish, and booksellers sell. What does it mean to agent?
Agents are the writer’s legal and fiduciary representative. They find writers to represent; read, edit, and submit work to editors at publishing houses, based on an understanding of houses, editors, and the work itself; manage the sale, negotiate the contract, and liaise between the writer and the publishing team up to and after the book’s release. Agents handle derivative or ancillary rights, like film/TV and often foreign, as well as place short stories or essays in magazines or literary journals. Increasingly, too, agents are a sounding board or even a collaborator, among the first to encourage or, as importantly, discourage writers in their intended line of attack for a next project. All this amounts to managing a writer’s career.
In exchange for these services, agents take a 15 percent commission on advances and royalties—any and all monies deriving from the intellectual property they’ve helped to exploit. Agents are like lawyers representing their clients’ interests on contingency: it’s “no win, no fee.” We are incentivized to tell the most convincing story about our clients and get them the best settlement for their writing troubles. But it’s not the legal metaphor that most in the industry reach for. At least not anymore.
Nowadays, the agent’s role is more often compared to that of a therapist, a coach, or a matchmaker. All creative acts entail great vulnerability on the part of the artist, and the agent is the author’s primary port of call in stormy weather, the reader of tortured first drafts or commiserator when a bad review lands. (When there’s red sky at night, the author is rightly off taking delight with her loved ones instead.) Yet these analogies don’t quite do the job, either. Over time, alongside their expanded stature on the business side, agents have, as McGrath heard repeatedly from her anonymized agents, assumed more responsibilities in the editorial realm. But the editing that agents do is not something they can speak too freely about, for fear of alienating editors or betraying clients’ trust, which accounts for why McGrath had difficulty in getting a full and vivid account of it on the record.
For the first half of the twentieth century, agents, if they were used at all, mainly handled contracts and made introductions. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s agent, Harold Ober, came on board only after Scribner’s had accepted the writer’s first novel, This Side of Paradise. And since Fitzgerald for his entire career remained a house author—working with editor Maxwell Perkins, who had threatened to quit if This Side of Paradise wasn’t published—Ober mostly negotiated the terms for his lucrative short stories in The Saturday Evening Post. That is, until Ober stopped advancing his client money, due to Fitzgerald’s worsening alcoholism, and the writer cut him loose. Ernest Hemingway, another “son” of Perkins (Fitzgerald made the introduction), never used an agent and had his personal attorney go over paperwork. One estimate is that before World War II, 10 to 12 percent of published authors used agents; by 1960 that figure had risen to 50 percent, and by 2008 it was closing in on 100 percent of those working with the major houses.
The agent’s rise—the growth of her duties and opportunities—was concurrent with the mid-century boom in publishing and its slow-but-steady conglomeration over the next few decades. From 1939 to 1945, the industry nearly doubled and thereafter continued to swell with college-educated readers hungry to pick up mass-market books or trade paperbacks for cheap at an expanding array of independent and chain bookstores. Hollywood, too, was eager to acquire novels and nonfiction to adapt as they competed against television. The gold rush for new writing put authors and their agents in a stronger bargaining position than ever before.
A sign that the balance of power was changing: McGrath states that in 1952 Scott Meredith became the first agent to submit a book simultaneously to multiple publishers, instead of sending it to one editor and then another until a deal was brokered. (Although according to Bennett Cerf’s memoir At Random, the head of a Hearst syndication service acted as an agent for foreign correspondent Richard Tregaskis in November 1942, when he sent the manuscript for Guadalcanal Diary “to nine publishers at the same time, asking for bids—something that had never been done before.”) Today, simultaneous submissions are the norm, and when multiple publishers are interested, the agent holds an “auction,” usually over email, where editors send in their bids, either best-and-final or in rounds, and the author’s right to work with any editor at the end is reserved. Sometimes authors opt to take a smaller deal in order to work with an editor they feel a stronger connection to, or to be at a house they view as a better fit for their book. But most authors take the largest advance, not only because it’s more money but because, as one of the agents that McGrath profiles, Andrew Wylie, said in the mid-aughts, it is an “iron law” that the more a publisher has spent acquiring a book, the more resources they will put behind publishing it. In an op-ed for The Washington Post written around the same time, Robert Weil, a venerable editor of mostly nonfiction, echoed the sentiment while decrying it: “The equation is simple: A large advance, at least six figures, is required for a book to be taken seriously.”
On an individual and ongoing basis, agents fight against conglomeration’s parlous effects on their authors—less competition, fewer risks—and yet as a class we have gained power and prestige from the more capitalized system. André Schiffrin, former Pantheon editor turned critic of commercial publishing, wrote about how corporate conglomeration in the 1970s and ’80s led to a fundamental change in the relationship between editors and their authors: it was once “unusual for an established author to be told that a new book was not likely to sell enough copies to justify Knopf’s publishing it. When Alfred Knopf was sent The Black Swan by Thomas Mann, he did not respond by saying that he preferred to wait until something a little more commercial came along.” As small, independent, generally break-even houses sold themselves off into larger media empires, higher returns were expected: the average yearly profit for most houses since the 1920s had been 4 percent, but now the wished-for figure is more like 10 to 15 percent. Schiffrin noted one of the important downstream implications of this: “Agents increasingly became the fixed point in authors’ lives, the only people who they could feel sure would be there to work with them in the future.”
To be that “fixed point” in an artist’s life is no small responsibility. Likewise, the expansion of the role in more strictly editorial terms. One of McGrath’s subjects, Lynn Nesbit, tells her that editors today “expect the book to be almost perfect when they buy it. That certainly wasn’t true when I started in the business.” Anonymous agents McGrath interviewed echo and expand on this in droves: “I do a ton of editorial work”; “At least half the books I’ve sold, I do more editorial work before the sale than the editor does afterward”; “We all edit. We all edit, and we think about not just the book as a piece of art and working on it for its own sake, but also how it will be most appealing to the audience it’s intended for.” McGrath gets strong testimony on that last point. Another agent tells her: “I want to make the lines better and all of that—the kind of classic stuff—but I’m also thinking about how I’m going to pitch it, and I’m making sure the book fits the pitch.”
Agents are the earliest chokepoint of art and commerce; that’s what they really negotiate. They represent their clients, often holding their hands at anxious moments in their careers, and, at the same time, because of who pays the bills up front, they act as gatekeepers for the publishing industry, standing outside the castle and scouting the horizon. Taking McGrath’s industry-eye view, you can see how the agent, putting so much work in pre-sale, is incentivized to guarantee that work will be rewarded at auction. For the agent chasing sales, there’s the temptation to be more risk-averse than the publishers themselves. In our own minds, though, we agents are mostly Robin Hoods, trying to liberate the greatest possible bounty for artists we believe in, who would not otherwise receive it. Indeed, some acknowledgments sections suggest that without the agent, that particular book might never have come into being, partly because the author could not otherwise afford, emotionally or practically, to write it. Good agents seek to preserve an author’s creative intentions while using market knowledge to prepare the work for its best chance of sale in a competitive, profit-driven arena. It’s generally wise to keep mum about how that staging is managed and leave any sense of business considerations in the wings, the spotlight firmly on the author.
All that behind-the-scenes editing offers a good test of the inevitable slipperiness McGrath encounters in her project. “Despite the necessity and prevalence of editorial work,” she writes, “when I asked agents for specific examples, they were either unable or unwilling to talk. Typically gregarious and sociable, agents became guarded, their language circumspect, on the topic of editing.” The agent’s trick is always a disappearing act. They must sustain “the illusion that their work is more divination than calculation” and simultaneously, by handling the cash and allowing the author not to bother about such dirty business, “maintain the fictions of authorial autonomy and artistic distinction from capital in the contemporary mediascape.” This is significant stuff, but when “a magician never reveals his secrets,” the task of establishing just how significant—shedding new light, as McGrath aspires to do, on the making of postwar and contemporary American fiction—is a tall order. Here and there, the agent’s invisibility and significance bisect and reinforce each other, and readers can’t expect much help from the likes of “Mark” or Binky. It’s up to McGrath to get the goods and tell all.
TO PROSECUTE HER CASE that agents became a significant force in modern American literature, McGrath mounts each chapter as a profile of an influential agent and his or her confrontation with a specific professional obstacle—how to pitch (Paul Revere Reynolds), how to represent short-story writers (Lynn Nesbit), how to make an American writer an international one (Andrew Wylie). This allows her to zoom out and examine the same challenges in today’s industry, bringing to bear impressive qualitative and quantitative research. McGrath’s book brims with a wealth of material, much of which would be otherwise difficult for an outsider to glean.
In her chapter “The Debut,” McGrath details Sterling Lord’s effort to launch Jack Kerouac’s career with On the Road, arguing that first novels have become a crucial means for agents, alongside writers, to establish themselves. After working for two years as an editor at True, 21, and Cosmopolitan, Lord started an agency in 1951 with Stanley Colbert. Less than a year later, fresh from what Kerouac perceived to be Robert Giroux’s rejection of his book—he had presented it to the editor typed out on a 120-foot-long roll of architectural tracing paper—the writer walked into Lord’s office. Lord signed him straightaway. Over the next few years, Lord tirelessly submitted the novel to one publisher after another: all rejections. During the same period, he interestingly did something else that is detailed by Gerald Howard, one of the few editors McGrath seems to have interviewed, in his recent book The Insider. Lord sent out over a half dozen other Kerouac novels, including Doctor Sax and Desolation Angels. No dice.
While word slowly spread around town of a brilliant-but-unpublishable novel—stylistically challenging, sexually explicit, downright libelous—Kerouac was building his platform with Lord’s help. Only Lord wasn’t alone. He couldn’t have had a more powerful ally. Malcolm Cowley, the hugely influential former critic for The New Republic and book editor responsible for the career-reappraising works The Portable Ernest Hemingway (1944) and The Portable William Faulkner (1946), had been a Kerouac fan for at least as long as Lord. (According to Howard, Cowley originally read a version of On the Road before Kerouac signed with Lord, sent to him by another agent, Phyllis Jackson.) Cowley was then serving as a consulting editor at Viking and pushed for the book’s acceptance, even while he turned down the other Kerouac novels Lord offered him. Cowley was responsible for pressing Kerouac’s fiction and nonfiction into the hands of magazine editors at New World Writing, The Paris Review, and New Directions. The resulting pieces in these prestigious outlets—just as they would today—helped vet Kerouac in the eyes of publishers and create an audience for his work. McGrath notes some of Cowley’s efforts, but she has to strain to keep Lord central to the process and her chapter’s argument.
Eventually, in 1957, all the effort and waiting paid off: On the Road was a thunderous success, following the lightning strike of a New York Times review that compared its era-defining quality to The Sun Also Rises. “I awoke one morning and found myself famous,” as Lord Byron said of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’sreception. For Kerouac, all changed, changed utterly. So, too, McGrath argues, the public’s relation to first novels. The phrase “debut-novel” was first deployed in print in 1960 by none other than a new critic named Patricia McManus, Viking’s former genius of public relations, who had been responsible for booking Kerouac on television programs and sending On the Road to influencers like Marlon Brando and Dave Brubeck.
McGrath parses the debut phenomenon today very well, how large advances possess huge symbolic value in signaling a publisher’s belief in a book, often becoming a key facet of how the deal is spoken about within the industry and how it is announced outside of it. Daniel Petrocelli, the lead attorney for Penguin Random House during the DOJ-contested merger trial with S&S, said at one point to the judge: “But, Your Honor, when you think about it, every book starts out as an anticipated top seller in the gleam of an author’s or editor’s eye, right? Every book is a dream.” No book is dreamier than a debut. The same holds true for other industries. “Why would you go after revenue? If you show people revenue, they’ll ask, ‘How much?’ And it will never be enough,” the billionaire investor in the HBO series Silicon Valley tells the main character. “But if you have no revenue, you can say you’re pre-revenue and you’re a potential pure play.” As McGrath writes, “A debut novelist without a track record has nothing but potential.”
While debuts can command high advances, sugar plums dancing in everyone’s heads, the novelist on her third or fourth book must contend with the reality of her sales track and what those figures say about her career’s trajectory. The debut novelist with a seven-figure advance is not in the clear, far from it. If not creatively afflicted in the manner of, say, Kerouac, who was mostly wrecked by his fame—many of the books published after On the Road he had in fact been written before it, those ones Lord had on submission throughout the 1950s—then they too will face the comedown if their debut doesn’t live up to the hype. Which it rarely does. McGrath trawls Publisher’s Marketplace, the leading industry news site and deal tracker,and arrives at a sobering conclusion: “Whatever their advance, approximately 60 percent of debut novelists do not publish a second book.”
Establishing how a “debut narrative” can be utilized in the rollout of a novel, McGrath isolates the kinds of books that work especially well within the promotional machinery of book publishing: namely, ones that deal with youth and that can blend the identity of author and protagonist (“the profiles write themselves”). Our culture’s cult of youth—one form McGrath does not discuss is the “Literary It Girl” phenomenon—leads her to remark: “The literary field of the twenty-first century is defined by its immaturity.”
McGrath’s structuring of her chapters, the historical problem-solution framing intercut with the contemporary testimonies, can leave them uneven or unwieldy. Her fieldwork and publishing-industry analyses are often more convincing as to the agent’s importance than the stories about the individual agents she hopes will “provide a new context for understanding major postwar American authors.” In her chapter “The Collection,” McGrath writes: “If, as Loren Glass has argued, the story of the short story at midcentury is the story of The New Yorker, and The New Yorker’s aesthetic sensibility was most clearly encapsulated in stories by Cheever, Barthelme, and Beattie, then it is equally plausible to argue that the short story flourished thanks to Nesbit’s advocacy of the very same.” The “if,” “and,” “then,” and “equally plausible” fastening of that sentence groans like an old bridge under a forty-ton truck. In “The Debut,” there’s the fact that Kerouac’s first novel was actually the far tamer The Town and the City, published seven years earlier by Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace. McGrath acknowledges this, but it doesn’t slow her down. And while it’s true Lord was a still new agent that fateful day Kerouac strode into his office, he had become, before On the Road was accepted at Viking, a very successful one, as he attests in his memoir Lord of Publishing. Fear Strikes Out, his client Al Hirshberg’s co-authored work with baseball player Jimmy Piersall (later a film starring Anthony Perkins), and Somebody Up There Likes Me, his client Rowland Barber’s co-authored work with boxer Rocky Graziano (later a film starring Paul Newman), were both published in 1955 to wide acclaim.
In another key chapter, McGrath writes about an agent’s taste, how important it is to develop a palate and become known for it. She selects Candida Donadio as her case study. An excellent choice. Donadio discovered Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis; at one time or another, she represented Mario Puzo, John Cheever, Jessica Mitford, and Robert Stone, too. The chapter doubles as a portrait of “the lunch,” meetings where editors and agents meet to catch up, talk shop, and swap “gossip, so much gossip.” McGrath even joins an agent “Leila” and an editor “Tom” at the storied Michael’s—the site of the Italian Pavilion where Donadio used to keep a daily table—for a cringeworthy meal that would’ve made Donadio leave the cannoli and take the gun. “Candida did not invent the lunch, but she perfected it,” McGrath writes, elsewhere stating with dramatic flair, “American postmodernism was born over lunch.” The issue for Middlemen is, as McGrath concedes, we have no written record of the lunches, no way to prove what went on or how it affected what appeared in print. Pugnacious, self-taught, and motherly, Donadio talked a lot, over the phone and meals and drinks, but we know little about why and how she fought for what she loved or how she came to love it. Donadio was “a mine of Sicilian proverbs,” Stone once told writer Karen Hudes; she would’ve likely known (and relished) the challenges facing anyone writing about her taste. As her ancient Italian ancestors used to say: De gustibus non est disputandum.
McGrath homes in on the moment in 1962 when Pynchon’s first editor, Corlies “Cork” Smith, moved from Lippincott to Viking and Donadio suggested that Pynchon write a short novel to fulfill his contract before following Smith to the new house. While drafting what he considered a potboiler, Pynchon wrote to Donadio that it was ‘‘a short story, but with gland trouble.” It became The Crying of Lot 49. “What does a mere suggestion amount to, in the grand narratives of literary history? Does advice rise to the level of a literary event? What role did Donadio play, in the end? She did not edit, she did not write: she pitched.” Good questions, and ones we’ve come to McGrath to answer, in no small part because of her stated aims. It’s frustrating, but McGrath makes a valiant effort to close-read her way out of a tough situation: “Searching for Candida overturns nothing but the most Pynchonian of questions: Is there order here, or just chaos? . . . Or are these ‘gemlike “clues”’—a dedication here, a brief acknowledgment there, the presumption of a matchmaker—‘only some kind of compensation. To make up for having lost the direct, epileptic Word.’” This move feels all the more unsatisfying given what we do know about Donadio’s fixed place in her writers’ lives: the nights she held them weeping in her arms; the weekends they spent holed up working at her Stonington, Connecticut, house (posing, in Pynchon’s case, as a contractor, while she tenderly rolled her eyes to encourage the less established and reclusive); the ways she kept them going through life crises that could have derailed many books. The agent activities that most interest McGrath—the pitching, the lunching, the selling into foreign markets—depend upon quieter acts of sustenance and support, without which literature cannot be made. That is to say, written.
While McGrath’s chapter on Andrew Wylie and the international market for American authors is sharp, the most successful chapter is “The Advocate,” which tells the story of the Black editor-turned-agent Marie Brown. Here, McGrath shows the challenges of selling work by writers of color, and being an agent of color, in an industry well over 70 percent white and not known for devising innovative strategies to reach readers it deems “hard to find.” Tracing a professional arc that’s sadly still recognizable today, Brown slowly rose the editorial ranks at Doubleday, hired in the wake of the civil rights movement when books by Black authors or about race relations were in high demand, but felt stymied by 1981, as Ronald Reagan assumed the White House. After a stint as editor in chief at a short-lived magazine, Brown found that “none of her former coworkers or industry acquaintances would give her an interview.” She worked two seasonal years as a bookseller before her mentor at Doubleday asked if she’d agent a biography of Diana Ross by the president of her fan club. “I resisted the notion of being an agent,” Brown tells McGrath, laughing. But she wanted back in the game, and has been championing the work of Black writers ever since.
Brown has seen as much change as she has seen remain the same. “Black life and Black culture are rediscovered every 10 to 15 years,” she told The New York Times in late 2020 for an opinion piece about the raft of best-selling books by writers of color in the wake of the George Floyd protests. These periods of “rediscovery” are tied to the headlines: a news cycle trained for a time on Black suffering and/or resistance to racism leads to a keen interest in books by Black writers, which leads to high advances. This is bittersweet for authors on multiple levels, and of course, just like with the double-edged sword of the debut novel, it becomes hard to get anywhere near earning out a high advance, especially when the so-called media landscape changes after publication.
As for Black readers being hard to find, Brown reflects, “Editors who had no knowledge of Black history could be sold projects by agents . . . because they are new subjects to them,” but not to Black book-buyers well-versed in their own history. Naturally, not all books about Black people are interesting to all Black readers, especially if the topic or its treatment is already familiar to them. Still, sometimes these books acquire unwarranted weight within publishing houses. Then when sales figures are low, there can be confirmation bias: Black people don’t read books. (When I started as an agent over a decade ago, my boss came back one day from lunch with a publisher who had said that to him, verbatim.)
An important source for McGrath is the agent “Tasha,” who shares the straight talk she gives her clients of color, which begins: “You have to be okay with being asked to do a lot of stuff that maybe white authors would not be asked to do.” The publicity and marketing infrastructure at publishing houses, Tasha explains, is built on the assumption that “the book buyer we have to cater to is the white woman. Maybe the middle-aged white woman, over 45.” What does that mean for a writer of color in practical terms? “You are going to have to be really thick-skinned and also really determined. . . . You’re going to have to expect that the covers you see will maybe tap into really dumb clichés about your particular culture, and we have to be willing to battle for that, to get a cover that actually works for your book.” McGrath notes the pronoun shift here, from the “you” who will need to gather strength to the “we” who will go into battle together. It’s a nice distillation of a good agent-author relationship.
MCGRATH HAS CAPTURED a great deal of the profession’s strangeness and its significance in the field of cultural production. Yet something vital is missing. Toward what I take to be the end of her research for Middlemen, McGrath emailed me, having spoken to one of my partners, asking if I’d sit for an interview. I eventually replied, apologizing for my tardiness and saying it reflected my ambivalence. I added: “I’m not sure I have any special wisdom to offer.” After reading Middlemen, I feel that statement is true. Others said what I would’ve about the business, and then some. But I suppose it’s best to cut the shit and admit it was a lie at the time. I didn’t want to be interviewed because anything original I might say would be about what transpires between me and my writers—the zone between Tasha’s “you” and “we.” That’s an area I’d prefer to let writers remark on, and it’s their commentary that is sorely missing from this book.
With some notable exceptions, Middlemen doesn’t engage much with writers on the subject of agents. (The same goes for editors.) It’s an absence unexplained by McGrath’s methodology, except insofar as the sociology of literature is generally more interested in structural relations than intimate ones, demand rather than supply. In her introduction, McGrath says previous scholars “stopped short of analyzing the products of the literary agent’s labor: literature itself.” But the agent’s labor usually is poured into the writer, without whom neither literary agents nor literature itself would exist. McGrath regrets that during her anthropological adventures in publishing, “the one observational situation that eluded me was the auction,” noting that those who refused to pull back that curtain assured her it would’ve been anticlimactic: merely a series of emails. (True enough.) But the notion that that kind of scene is the only one McGrath didn’t get feels symptomatic. There’s something a little bloodless in devoting an entire chapter to the ritual performance of lunch, while conveying no real sense of what agents do with and for writers every day (or night).
In her afterword about the writing of Middlemen, McGrath mentions that back when it was a mere graduate-student dissertation, she had difficulty getting agents to speak with her. But once she signed with her own excellent agent, Alia Hanna Habib, and got a contract from Princeton University Press, “participants’ view of me changed. Agents knew my agent. . . . I was no longer simply an academic researcher but had become legible within trade publishing as a writer.” This framing around legibility is in keeping with the sociological approach, but it seems a missed opportunity, in this meta-textual section, to stay silent on what else her agent did for her throughout the process she has just written the book about. I’m fairly confident she could’ve gotten other writers out there to speak candidly about their experiences with agents, since both Childress and Thompson did so in their much less comprehensive studies, each including testimony of some unsavory behavior.
Donadio and Pynchon worked together from 1961 to 1982. They fell out over Pynchon’s romance with Donadio’s junior colleague, Melanie Jackson—now his wife and a powerhouse agent—who quit the agency and struck out on her own, taking Pynchon and a string of clients with her. Two years later, Donadio, who had been devastated by his defection, sold a collection of over 120 letters that he wrote to her over a nineteen-year period to a private collector for $45,000. When The New York Times quoted snippets from them following the death of their owner, Pynchon’s lawyers successfully fought to have them sealed until after the writer’s death. Pynchon lambasts critics and politicians; he speaks of a creative crisis, with four novels in process, but also speculates: “If they come out on paper anything like they are inside my head then it will be the literary event of the millennium”; he considers quitting writing, wondering if he is any good, recalling his early interest in mathematics; he compares Donadio to a guru. I wish Middlemen had more time for the spontaneous, idiosyncratic, human aspect of the job. It’s tantalizing to read the notoriously reticent Pynchon spill his well-guarded guts; and yet as most agents could tell you, having heard them sung in every key, these are the daily concerns, the extreme swings, of anyone so brave, and yet so crazy, as to call herself a writer.
Elias Altman is a partner at Massie McQuilkin & Altman Literary Agents.