Scholarship on Anglo-American literary agents tends to fall into two categories: historical studies focusing primarily on the emergence of the profession in late 19th-century Britain, and sociological and literary scholarship, concentrating on the post-1970s period. The development of the profession between the 1920s and the 1960s has so far received little to no scholarly attention. In 1928, the Society of Authors’ Representatives (SAR) was founded as a professional organization in New York City by dramatic agents to pursue the following goals, as specified in the certificate of incorporation: “[t]o improve the business of acting as authors representatives,” to “enforce a code of business ethics” among agents, “stamp out […] pernicious practices” of same, and “maintain offices and a Club House for authors representatives and in connection therewith to buy, sell, own, possess, lease, deal in and deal with any and every character of personal and real property”. The corporation soon opened membership to literary agents, yet few participated in the SAR meetings in the first two decades of the organization; only in the mid-1940s did they begin to think that issues specific to their trade warranted the creation of a distinct literary branch. Remaining within the SAR and periodically assembling with dramatic agents, as of 1946, literary agents held their own meetings, exchanging trade practices and globally functioning as an information network, drawing on their individual networks with publishers and editors; they also at times attempted to act as counsel in litigious situations. My hypothesis is that the sociability of this business community as exemplified by literary agents within the organization, while initially intended to foster cohesion, ultimately served as a means of controlling and legitimizing the profession, both within their own ranks, and within the book trade at large. Using the archive of the SAR – disseminated across the archives of several former members, with the bulk constituted by the actual SAR records – I propose to explore this hypothesis focusing on the period of the 1950s, when the literary branch shaped its own sociability.