Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction

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Middlemen

by
Laura B. McGrath

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Middlemen
Author:	Laura B. McGrath
Genre:	Non-fiction
Written:	2026
Length:	225 pages
Availability:	Middlemen - US
	Middlemen - UK
	Middlemen - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction

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Our Assessment:

B : good overview of and introduction to this peculiar function in the book *business*

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Harper's	.	4/2026	Dan Piepenbring

From the Reviews:

"McGrath devotes a whole chapter to lunch. This may not be enough. (...) Middlemen forms a trio with Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2011), which examines the rise of MFAs, and Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction (2023), which follows the effects of publishing’s conglomeration. Together, they conjure a wheezing twine factory -- the relic of a bygone era, marred with unsightly retrofits from which a good yarn may still occasionally emerge." - Dan Piepenbring, Harper's

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The 'middlemen' Laura B. McGrath writes about are an often overlooked -- at least by consumers -- part of the publishing industry, literary agents. (As she also notes in her Preface: "the term 'middleman' strikes an ironic chord because most literary agents are women" -- "roughly 80 percent women" nowadays.) In six chapters, each focused on a different aspect of the business -- and often devoting considerable space there to one representative agent, such as Candida Donadio, Marie Brown, or Andrew Wylie, -- she gives a good overview and introduction to the role of the literary agent in the publishing business in the United States, how it (and publishing) has changed over the years, and how it effects what gets published (and how it is published).
       A chapter on 'The Debut', for example, focuses on the introduction of new talent, with more riding on that first publication (or at least what is billed and presented as such -- she uses the example of On the Road, with agent Sterling Lord re-introducing (much more successfully) Jack Kerouac as a 'first novelist' (after the dud of The Town and the City)). McGrath argues that: "debuts are just as crucial for an agent trying to stablish himself as they are for the author" -- and that expectations (as, for example, suggested by the size of the advance paid) must be met if the author is to continue in the business, reporting that sixty per cent of debut novelists "do not publish again" (!).
       The isolated/limited-bubble nature of the business is repeatedly made clear, such as how much New York City is the epicenter of the industry, to the extent that, ridiculously: "Between 2000 and 2022, more novels were set in New York City than in the other top thirty most populous cities in the United States combined". There's also how lily-white the industry is, explored by McGrath in her chapter on the agent as 'The Advocate', primarily using the example of (Black) agent Marie Brown As McGrath notes: "The composition of the profession of agenting has direct bearing on the authors published", and Black voices (among others) certainly have a harder time finding a place at the table.
       And, as she points out:

We needn't speculate about the insularity of publishing's social networks; structural similarity is reinforced through data-drive acquisitions. The network reproduces homogeneity by codifying sameness -- or at least comparability -- in the form of comp title data.

       The example of Philip Roth is a fascinating one she presents -- first, because he thought he could do without a literary agent once he had achieved considerable success ("There was no reason to give up 10 percent to his agent, he thought then"), firing agent Candida Donadio in 1972, and then, well over a decade later, signing on with Andrew Wylie, who parlayed his rights -- especially the foreign rights -- into a tidy flow of income. (McGrath notes that Wylie: "knew tht Roth was being paid poorly at Farrar, Straus and Giroux" -- though she points out, parenthetically, that: "Roth rarely earned out" (which surely suggests he was being paid an appropriate amount: if an author can't even earn back his advance, then he's being paid more than he is worth .....).)
       McGrath devotes considerable space to Wylie -- correctly noting that: "Poaching is the least interesting thing about Andrew Wylie" (as, indeed, if publishing is to be considered a business (admittedly a big *if*), then signing someone who has been 'built up' by another agent seems entirely reasonable). Her discussion of how Wylie has parlayed foreign rights sales (with their short terms) and sales success abroad into good money for his clients is of particular interest (as is her account of visiting the Frankfurt Book Fair, and how differently Wylie positions himself there than most agents). (She also brings in the specialist field of foreign rights agents and scouts.)
       McGrath also notes that:

So committed is Wylie to securing a literary legacy for his clients that he has begun to represent their literary estates as well as those of other significant writers thus ensuring that their work attains the status of classic, even -- perhaps, especially -- in their absence.

Wylie's client list -- of living authors as well as estates -- is certainly very impressive, but, as I've often noted on this site, his representation of estates does not serve readers at all well, with books by many of the authors whose estates he handles unavailable (or untranslated). (Certainly, an agent's job is to do his or her best for the client -- the author -- but that often leaves readers by the wayside. (Which is one of the big problems I have with these particular 'middlemen' -- not that that there aren't enough other aspects of the *business* gumming up the works.))
In a Coda chapter on the Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster merger case (see the memorandum opinion (warning ! dreaded pdf format !)) McGrath amusingly notes how:

Judge Pan, like the DOJ lawyers and those representing Penguin Random House, clearly expected publishing to work like a normal business, in which decisions are made strictly on the basis of profit and loss. The court struggled to reconcile testimony that was, on its face, entirely contradictory (or would have been, if one were selling, say, shoes): on the one hand, every agent testified that the best deal was not necessarily the most lucrative deal, even while they testified, on the others, that it was their duty as a fiduciary to act in the best interest of their clients.

Throughout Middlemen there are also many titbits of interest about the book business -- from the astonishing (and worrying): "only twenty-five agents are responsible for representing half of the authors short listed for major American literary prizes in the twenty-first century" (by McGrath's count) to the (endnote) observation as to why simultaneous submissions (and book auctions) are a relatively new phenomenon:

One overlooked, but very crucial technological development in the history of publishing is the introduction of photocopying with the Xerox machine in 1959. One reason why submissions were handled exclusively, and in rank order, was because one manuscript would be sent, via courier, from publisher to publisher. When a publisher passed on a book, the gentlemanly thing to do was to return it to the agent so they could send it out again.

The strangeness of the *business* of publishing -- and the role, for both better and worse, of these peculiar middlemen -- is well-documented by McGrath here, and Middlemen also does give a good sense of how and why the 'literary marketplace' in the US looks the way it does. And, yes, one can understand why publishers and editors welcome -- warily, but still -- these gatekeepers, but I remain entirely unconvinced of any benefit to readers.

- M.A.Orthofer, 30 April 2026

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Links:

Middlemen:

Princeton University Press publicity page

Reviews:

Laura B. McGrath:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Books on Books and Publishing

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About the Author:

Laura B. McGrath teaches at Temple University.

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