Sprecher
Beschreibung
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 to show how agents influence what we read. Weaving together original archival research, data analysis, and interviews with scores of agents and other publishing professionals, Middlemen demonstrates that agents—eighty percent of whom are in fact women—are much more than “middlemen.” As intermediaries between author and publisher, agents act as advocates, matchmakers, negotiators, and tastemakers, and they must balance artistic values with the commercial imperatives of publishing conglomerates. In this talk, McGrath will show how the decisions that US agents make about what books to figuratively export, and the strategies that they use to sell an author’s work internationally, have led to the shape of American fiction abroad and the development of the Great American Novel.
Speaker Bio
Laura B. McGrath is Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Literature (Princeton UP, 2026). Situated at the intersection of literary sociology, book history, and digital humanities, her research has appeared in venues such as New Literary History and American Literary History, as well as popular outlets such as The Atlantic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Stanford University Literary Lab, the Smithsonian Institute of American History, and the New York Public Library. She is the recipient of the 1921 Prize in American Literature.