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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

“Mapping and Defending a Maligned profession: Literary Agents in the United States as seen by Themselves in the Post-WWII era”

Résumé

Literary agents have recently received attention in book and media history, from as evidenced by Mary Ann Gillies’ historically-focused The Profession of the Literary Agent in Britain (2007), or by Simone Murray’s The Adaptation Industry. The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (2012), focusing on contemporary globalization of the book trade, or Laura McGrath, "Literary Agency" (American Literary History 33:2, 2021). However, much remains unknown about the historical development of the profession between the 1920s and the late 20th century. In the United States, where the first professional agency was founded in the 1890s, the agent was still not fully a fixture in the book trade in the aftermath of World War II; in fact, many of the early complaints about agents as unethical mercenaries of letters continued to resound both in authors’ letters, and in the press. The archive of the Society of Authors’ Representatives (SAR), which represented a large majority of New York-based literary agents starting in the mid-1940s, and possibly the leading professional association of agents until the 1980s, is an extraordinary site for an exploration of the history of the profession. Based on fragments from this still little-known archive, this presentation proposes to analyze the agents’ discourse of self-definition, self-representation and defense of their profession in print. The Society’s “What is a Literary Agent?” pamphlet, elaborated and revised between 1955 and the late 1960s, is especially illustrative of this discourse, revealing the importance of “increasing the standing of the agent” as the Chairman of the Literary Committee of the SAR emphasized to its members in the Spring of 1954. Considering this document along with essays published by important agents and officers of the SAR in the early 1970s, I will endeavor to show that the drafting, revising and circulation of this document, which seems to have been a recurring preoccupation for members, bear testimony, (1) to the process of professionalization of the agent, to (2) their relatively uncomfortable intermediary position and their need to justify their role, and (3) to the institutional history of the SAR.
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Dates et versions

hal-03954533 , version 1 (24-01-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03954533 , version 1

Citer

Cécile Cottenet. “Mapping and Defending a Maligned profession: Literary Agents in the United States as seen by Themselves in the Post-WWII era”. Power of the Written Word, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Jul 2022, Amsterdam (Hollande), France. ⟨hal-03954533⟩
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