Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

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...