16
of his sentences give his voice the anachronistic timbre
of a tweedy Ivy League professor. This image of gentility
is quickly dispelled by his tendency to punctuate emo-
tional sentences by swearing, which more closely evokes
his post-collegiate years downtown, socializing with
avant-garde artists and intellectuals such as Andy Warhol
and Allen Ginsberg. Literature, Wylie says, was a means
to experience the lives and perspectives of other people,
and his work as an agent is an extension of this impulse.
“My wife points out that when I’m trying to buy an
apartment, I will pay whatever the seller wants,” Wylie
says. “And when I’m trying to sell an apartment, I will sell
the apartment for whatever I’m offered. I can’t negotiate
at all for myself. But I
can
negotiate very well about some-
one else. And the reason is
that someone else interests
me a lot more than myself.”
By the time most people
come into the office, Wylie
has already been working
for a few hours. He has the
same routine every day
(its repetitiveness, he says,
drives his wife crazy). He
rises every morning before
5:30 a.m., checks his e-mail
while brushing his teeth,
goes to the gym for an hour,
and is at work by 7:30. On
more uneventful days, he
is primarily occupied with
e-mail from clients, sort-
ing through nonfiction pro-
posals, or communicating
with his London office about
international rights. Other
times, his work is more
face to face. Recently, for
example, he met a client
for breakfast at 8:30 a.m.,
“zoomed” around the city
meeting with various pub-
lishing houses, and by five
o’clock he had successfully
brokered a book deal. He
returns home around 8 p.m. and eats a quick dinner at
home before going to bed. His weekends are often filled
with even more e-mail.
These relentless working hours don’t quite fit the pop-
ular image of the New York literary world, which many
imagine as an endless stream of cocktail parties and caf
é
meetings. Wylie is friends with his clients, he says, but
their relationships are more business-like than friend-
ship-like.
“I don’t socialize much,” he says. “There isn’t enough
time, frankly.”
This intense attitude toward work is perhaps most
T
he NewYork office of AndrewWylie ’65’s eponymous
literary agency is off Columbus Circle. In contrast
to the nearby pandemonium of Broadway, Wylie’s
office has the contemplative atmosphere of a literary
monastery. Between the wooden tables, navy couches,
and massive windows, abstract paintings by William
Burroughs and a photograph by Susan Sontag hang on
the whitewashed walls.
But the defining feature of the office is its rows and rows
of books, shelved in towering bookcases and stacked
neatly on tables, as if serving a structural function like
hundreds of paper bricks.
Literary agents perform a variety of crucial functions
for the writers they represent – they negotiate contracts
with publishers, find suit-
able editors, and handle
the intricacies of rights
and royalties. Because
their work is done pri-
marily behind the scenes,
agents rarely reach a level
of stardom equal to that
of their clients. But with a
largely unmatched author
list, which includes Martin
Amis, Jorge Luis Borges,
Italo Calvino, Philip Roth,
Salman Rushdie, Vladimir
Nabokov, John Updike, and
dozens of others, Wylie is
the rare literary agent who
has
gained a reputation to
match his list of heavy-
weight clients.
To those familiar with
his work, Wylie’s client list
is inextricably linked to his
reputation as a hard-hitting
negotiator. Perhaps the most
well-known indicator of this
persona is the nickname –
“the Jackal” – given to him in
the mid-1990s by the Brit-
ish press. But in contrast
to the image perpetuated
by the media, Wylie describes himself as naturally shy.
This is why, he says, despite his interest in literature, he
became an agent instead of a writer.
“If you’re a writer, you’ve got to be confident in your-
self,” Wylie says. “And, you know, beginning even before
St. Paul’s, but surely at St. Paul’s and then later at Harvard,
I was not very comfortable in my skin. I was more com-
fortable in other people’s skin.”
Notwithstanding Wylie’s friendly demeanor, he still casts
a somewhat formidable aura in person. The dropped r’s
and elongated vowels of his Boston Brahmin accent
(
covuh lettuh, St. Poowahl’s
) and the measured cadence
You have to develop
the confidence of
judgment, which
is not something
you’re born with,
or something that
you inherit from
studying literature
in college; I had to
really develop it. It’s
like working out your
f
stomach muscles.
“
“
