Sprecher
Beschreibung
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 in the creation of the Independent Literary Agents Association, which reunited with the SAR in 1992 to form the Association of Authors’ Representatives.
Contrary to many agencies’ records, the SAR records held at the Butler Library at Columbia University (New York) are a rather small (15 boxes, 1939-1991). One of its specificities is that it provides a rare collective perspective on US literary agents. The detailed minutes of the different committees within the society reveal the workings of a professional organization; they also shed light on the development of a profession that gained a firm foothold in New York as the city was becoming, after World War II, one of the most prominent publishing centers in the Western world. These records, especially after 1946 when the SAR formed a specific literary branch, offer us representations of the profession even as its members sometimes struggled to articulate a common definition. I am interested in the historical and discursive construction of the profession. Who were the SAR members? How did they contribute to shaping the profession? What do the society’s rules, by-laws, and code of ethics tell us about this “soft” profession? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this presentation. In my view, the fundamental issue is that of the legitimization of the profession in the United States, before the turn of the 1970s. I will examine how discourse, practices, and regulations documented in the SAR records can be understood as addressing a deficit in legitimacy.
Speaker Bio:
Cécile Cottenet is professor of American Studies at Aix-Marseille Université (France). She is the coordinator of an online project on mediators of US literature in France in the 20th century (https://dicopalitus.huma-num.fr/), which features several literary agents. Her long-term interest in mediators of texts in publishing history has led her to investigate the role of agents in the transatlantic circulation of US fiction (Literary Agents in the Transatlantic Book Trade: American Fiction, French Rights, and the Hoffman Agency, Routledge, 2017; “Bringing Books to France. Literary Agents in Cold War Transatlantic Networks,” 2025). She is currently researching the history of literary agents in the United States, with a specific focus on their professionalization between the 1920s and the 1960s.