Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

Scouts, like agents, are among the intermediaries and “gatekeepers” in the international literary and publishing industry, each of whom now performs a clearly defined role. However, a look at the immediate postwar period reveals that, before and during the period in which these socio-economic functions were ultimately given clear definition, the division of tasks was often blurred and...

Middlemen rewrites literary history from the perspective of one of its most important but least visible figures: the literary agent. Chronicling the story of agents in the United States from the 1950s to today, Laura McGrath uncovers their critical role in the making of American literature. From the famed three-martini lunch to the Frankfurt Book Fair, Middlemen takes readers behind the scenes...

On 8 May 1931, author James Hanley (1897-1985) wrote a begging letter to publishers Chatto & Windus. ‘I am in the position of being a person who is getting married next Thursday and who has no money’ he explained. ‘I cannot ask Pinker for anything because he has already helped my people who are very poor indeed. […] It is Pinker who is practically keeping my parents out of the bloody...

This paper investigates how literary agents operated in the gendered and bureaucratic infrastructures, shaping the production of modernist texts and interwar literary culture. By examining the archives of major publishers such as Chatto & Windus, the Hogarth Press, and Duckworth, it focuses on marginalia such as handwritten annotations and literary agents’ commentary that crowd the margins of...

In 2022, Corinna Norrick-Rühl and Miaïna Razakamanantsoa acknowledged the issue of investigating literary agents and representatives in archives, indicating that researchers’ work may, in this regard, ‘be influenced by the work of others, such as by former employees of the publisher and their filing preferences, but also by archivists and their knowledge organization strategies’ (C....

This paper examines the archival visibility of two women literary agents, Denyse Clairouin in France and Annie Laurie Williams in the United States, in order to ask what it means to “find” an agent in the archive. Their cases present strikingly different archival configurations. Williams’s professional activity is preserved in a substantial named collection at Columbia University, where...

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the profession of literary agent emerged in Scandinavia, largely shaped by three pioneers: David Grünbaum in Copenhagen, Gösta Dahl in Stockholm, and Lena I. Gedin, initially based in Berlin and later in Stockholm.
The sources documenting their activities are scarce, despite their fundamental role in establishing and defining the profession...

This paper shares early findings and current questions from a new research project, Women of Letters, Women of Books, devoted to women who mediated the transatlantic and transamerican circulation of texts in the second half of the twentieth century. Stemming from a previous project on literary agents specifically, the project branches out to women who acted as scouts, translators, readers for...

During and in the aftermath of the Second World War, Allied information and propa-ganda agencies engaged with translation in several ways. While leaflets in local lan-guages were dropped on enemy territories, and speakers’ voices travelled on radio frequences, booklets and guides helped troops and civilians navigating a global war. However, organisations like the British Central Office of...

Over the course of his forty-year career, James Baldwin recruited the very best professionals—agents, lawyers, and accountants--to manage his literary business. This is a little-known fact because scholars and critics of Baldwin’s canon have not systematically surveyed and analyzed those relationships.
Drawing from Baldwin’s business records sourced in multiple US archives (the...

Between 1960 and 1973, Jonathan Cape's manuscript books record 1,744 submissions of foreign-language and translated works, of which fewer than five per cent reached contract. This paper reads that ledger as an archive of refusal as much as of acquisition, and uses it to reassess the place of the literary agent in Anglo-American translation commissioning under Tom Maschler.
Drawing on a funded...

A typical day at the ALI: how a literary agency shapes texts and editions
The paper examines the operations of ALI (Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale) from the 1950s to the early 1980s, when the agency was headed by Erich Linder. ALI’s archives – now held in Milan by the Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori Foundation – together with contemporary interviews and accounts provided by some of Linder’s...

In 1928, a group of dramatic agents founded the New York Society of Authors’ Representatives (SAR), a professional organization of East coast agents. Its initial purpose was to foster “a better understanding among all agents” and elaborate a code of ethics that would improve the standards of the profession and, consequently, their image within the publishing industry. In 1977, a split resulted...

Founded in 1995 by Karin Graf in Berlin, the literary agency Graf & Graf is one of the leading agencies in the German-speaking world. Graf & Graf’s im pressive client list contains about 300 writers, many of them award-winning, as well as bestselling novelists and upcoming writers. In conversation with Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Karin Graf and Heinke Hager, CEO for 15 years, share insights from the...

This paper primarily investigates the postwar career of the literary agent B.J. Buber (1892-1950). A representative of the Agenzia letteraria internazionale (ALI) in France, the polyglot Buber embedded himself simultaneously in multiple literary, linguistic, and political milieus. He leveraged his Paris contacts as well as relations with such authors as Elio Vittorini and Anne Seghers to...

Literary agencies rarely appear in the archive as actors in their own right. They surface as senders of offers, as clauses in contracts, as recipients of statements. This paper takes that marginal position as its starting point and asks what mediation actually consists of when it is examined as work rather than judged by its outcome. Drawing on correspondence between Ruth Liepman and Fritz J....

The international success of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s books, especially Pippi Longstocking (1945), is largely due to her contacts with the German publisher Oetinger. When Friedrich Oetinger, a bookseller and director of the publishing house Verlag für Wirtschaft und Sozialpolitik Friedrich Oetinger & Co, met Astrid Lindgren in 1949, he acquired the rights to her Pippi Långstrump and...

In my lecture, I focus on the first three decades of the literary agency International Editors’ Co. (since 2021 International Editors & Yañez, Co.), founded in Buenos Aires in 1939 by Annie and Hugo Lifczis (Lifezis). On the basis of various archive collections, I show the genesis of the agency’s network during the German exile, especially in the correspondence with the author Leo Perutz. The...

In the USA the 1960s and 1970s — driven by the civil rights struggles of African Americans and the decolonization movements — were marked by a keen interest on the part of the publishing world in the voices of Black intellectuals. Moreover, the 1960s represented a turning point in terms of the internationalization of cultural circles in Europe, where African American writers succeeded in...

Berta Zuckerkandl’s role as a translator and as a literary and theatre agent has long remained overshadowed by her public persona as an influential salonnière and journalist. Rooted in the liberal, upper middle class Jewish milieu, her salon in Vienna was a significant cultural hub, just as the salon of her sister Sophie in Paris — who was married to Paul Clemenceau, the brother of Georges...