Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

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...