Every industry has its share of hidden gems—those people who are cherished by their colleagues and peers but barely known outside of the business. Book publishing is no exception, which is why the name Georges Borchardt probably doesn't ring a bell unless you've worked with him or are lucky enough to be one of his clients. Relatively unknown outside of publishing circles for more than fifty years, he seems to lack the gene for self-promotion.

Borchardt was born in Berlin in 1928. His early life, spent in Paris, was marked by war and heartbreak: His father died of cancer when he was eleven, and his mother and much of the rest of his family was killed in the concentration camps. As a teenager, Borchardt spent almost two years in hiding at a school in Aix-en-Provence, where his name did not appear on the official roll. "I was a sort of nonperson," he says. After the war he moved to America and found work at a literary agency that specialized in foreign writers. (When he arrived, it had just sold Albert Camus' The Stranger to Knopf for $350.) Borchardt served as the agency's assistant and soon began to look for authors of his own. In 1953 he came across an Irish playwright and novelist who wrote in French and, after selling three of his books to Grove Press, American readers were introduced to the work of Samuel Beckett. Other early authors included Laurent de Brunhoff, Marguerite Duras, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. In 1959 Borchardt took on the task of finding an American publisher for Elie Wiesel's Night. After numerous rejections, he finally placed the memoir with a small press, Hill and Wang, for an advance of $250. Since then the book has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and sold more than ten million copies in the United States alone.

Over the past half century, Borchardt; his wife, Anne; and their daughter, Valerie (who joined the Borchardt Agency in 1999) have built a staggering list of clients. They include poets John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Rafael Campo, and Philip Schultz; fiction writers T. C. Boyle, Robert Coover, David Guterson, Charles Johnson, Ian McEwan, Claire Messud, and Susan Minot; nonfiction writers Anne Applebaum, Stanley Crouch, Susan Jacoby, Tracy Kidder, and Kate Millett; and the estates of Hannah Arendt, Samuel Beckett, Robert Fagles, John Gardner, Aldous Huxley, and Tennessee Williams.

While Borchardt's credentials are impressive—and go a long way toward explaining why he is considered a luminary within the industry—they pale in comparison with his extraordinary charm and personal magnetism. His laugh, a high staccato that welled up frequently during our conversation, is a particular delight. T. C. Boyle has especially strong feelings about his agent, once describing him as "the most wonderful man who ever lived on this earth." After spending just a little time with him, I can understand why.

Your background is quite different than a lot of people in publishing.
My background is different primarily because most literary agents in America have English as their native language. But I started out without knowing the language. I grew up in Paris. I was in France during the war, so I spent pretty much two years in hiding. My father died early on, when I was eleven, and my mother and most of my family were deported to the concentration camps and died there. But I had two older sisters who survived. I was in hiding in Aix-en-Provence. I was at the lycée there. Through connections, the head of the lycée had allowed me to stay there as a boarder. But I wasn't on any roll. In other words I was a sort of non-person. So as a result I was able to get my two baccalaureates. And when I went back to Paris, my sisters and I actually got our apartment back, but it was emptied of all its furniture and it was rather gloomy to camp in the empty rooms. I went to law school for a year but I was really too young for it—I was seventeen—and too unbalanced by what had happened. I really didn't like it. My sisters had worked in the American field hospital in Aix-en-Provence when France was liberated, where they had met all of these gorgeous American G.I.s who were distributing marvelous goodies like Spam and Wonder Bread, and they dreamed of going to America. We had relatives who had gone to America. So I figured I'd go with them for a year, which would be an honorable way of not continuing with law school.

When was the first time that you were really aware of books? Were you interested in them as a young boy?
Books were a big thing in my family. Today if you give a book to a child for his or her birthday the child feels rather annoyed. It's like a punishment. But when I was a child I had a list of books that I wanted for my birthday. I would sometimes ask if I could have one of my favorite books bound—French books are all softcover—and then it was a matter of going to a shop and selecting the leather and the endpapers and so on. I liked books as objects. I liked to read all the things that boys liked to read then. Alexandre Dumas. James Fenimore Cooper. I remember one novel that I particularly loved called Ivanhoé, which I think in English is called Ivanhoe. So I was interested in books but not any more than anyone else. When I was sixteen or so, like most of the more literate people my age, I was totally in love with André Gide. I remember walking down the street in Aix-en-Provence and sort of reciting as a mantra the opening line of Gide's Les Nourritures Terrestres: "Nathanaël, je t'enseignerai la ferveur." Well, Nathanaël, of course, in English is Nathaniel, but somehow Nathanaël has much more resonance than Nathaniel, which sounds ordinary. Nathanaël sounds like the trumpets in a Handel piece. I don't think I ever really thought about the meaning of the sentence; I just liked the way it resonated.

In France when I was in school, every year you read a play by Molière, a play by Racine, a play by Corneille, and you also had a special subject called "recitation" for which you memorized either poems or parts of these plays. In France you got not only a grade in every subject but you also got ranked. So you could be first in your class or twenty-eighth, or somewhere in between. It was a sort of public humiliation. Being first didn't make you popular but being last made you ridiculous. And in recitation I was practically always first. I was always assigned the major parts in these tragedies, which was usually the female role because in most of the plays, certainly the Racine plays, that was usually the central character. So I think language was always very much a part of what I was interested in. But I certainly never thought of working in publishing and didn't know anything about publishing. I thought I would work in the music industry because my father was the head of a phonograph record firm. So I always had a lot of records at home. It was mostly classical music except that the star of the firm was Édith Piaf, so I had a bit of everything.

What year was it when you came over?
It was '47. I knew some English because I'd had it for six years in school, just as I had Latin for six years, and I knew English pretty much the way I knew Latin. I was very good at both, in school, which meant translating texts from Latin into French and from French into Latin as well as from French into English and from English into French—and maybe memorizing the occasional poem about daffodils. But I didn't speak the language. It wasn't taught that way in French schools at the time. So when I came here, to my great chagrin, I didn't understand a word of what people were saying. It would always take me a long time to get a sentence together in my head. By the time my sentence was ready and polished, the conversation was already miles away from where it had been, and what I was going to say no longer fit it. I would also mispronounce things and, as I'm sure you know from traveling in foreign countries, when you mispronounce something and people start laughing, it's very embarrassing.

How did you get into publishing?
A friend of mine helped me compose two ads that I put in the New York Times. I don't remember exactly what they said but it was something like, "Nineteen-year-old Frenchman blah blah blah," and the other one would have said something similar.

These were ads that people would place when they were looking for work?
Yes. They would say, "This is who I am, and I'm looking for a job." There was a lot of that going on. I'd gone to various employment agencies and they all said, "What is your American experience?" Well, I had no American experience. When I put the ad in the paper I expected a good amount of mail. Still, I figured I could carry it by myself, so I went to Times Square to get it. There were only two letters, one for each ad, but both from the same person. The letterhead said "Authors and Publishers Representative." One said, "If you're interested in the letterhead, come in next Tuesday at ten." The other one said, "If you're interested, call for an appointment." My English was not very good, and it was even worse on the phone, so I decided to go in person. The woman who owned the agency was named Marion Saunders. She was the daughter of a British Foreign officer, so she'd spent a lot of time in Berlin and Paris and all over. She spoke quite a few languages, and she enjoyed speaking them, and our interview was primarily in French so that she could practice her French. She was very pleased with the way it went, and at the end of the interview she said, "I think I'll probably offer you the job, but I wrote to one other person from whom I haven't heard yet." I took out the other letter and said, "I am the other person." So that's how I got into publishing.

What was the agency like?
It was primarily doing foreign rights for other agencies but also representing a French literary agent who controlled most of what was coming out of France because, in France, most authors don't have agents. They give the rights to the publishers. And this agent in Paris, who was represented by my boss in New York, had an arrangement with Gallimard, the main literary house in France, to represent all of its authors. The husband of the Paris agent had been a friend of Hemingway's and various other American authors who had been in Paris at the time and had sold Hemingway, Dos Passos, and practically all of the other major American authors of that period to Gallimard. In exchange, Gallimard was giving her many of its French authors who had come out of World War II, people like Sartre and Camus. When I got there she had just sold a book by Camus called The Stranger to Knopf for, I think, three hundred fifty dollars. I was nineteen and I was amazed that you could get paid to read books. Although I was also a gofer. I did all the dirty work. I did the filing. I did the bookkeeping. I'd go to the post office to get stamps or to the bank to get money because in those days you still used those things. But the main thing I liked was reading the books that came in. And instead of just limiting it to the books that came from the agent in Paris, I started going through the French equivalent of Publishers Weekly to see if there was anything else that might be interesting. I had no idea what we could sell, but when I'd see something that I wanted to read, I would ask for a sample copy. It was a good way to build up a little personal library. You have to remember that books were extremely valuable in France because during the war there was no paper. There were really small printings. So if you owned a book by André Gide, for example, all of your friends would want to borrow it. You owned something really valuable.

So I'd go through these catalogues and if something caught my eye I'd ask for it. At one point I asked for three books by this Irishman who was writing in French called Beckett. I read them and thought, "This is really quite interesting." I started sending them around—they were in French—and I'd get letters saying, you know, "Pale imitator of Joyce" or "Unreadable prose." Finally, one day, a man named Don Allen came to the office. He was working for Grove but on a freelance basis. He was doing the same thing for New Directions. He saw these worn copies of the three Beckett books on my desk and said, "Oh, you have Beckett?" I probably said, "You've heard of him?" He took the books and about a month later Barney [Rosset] called and said he wanted to buy them. He made a very generous offer: a thousand dollars for the three of them. Since everybody knows that novels sell better than plays, we divided it up so it was two hundred dollars for Waiting for Godot and four hundred dollars for each of the novels, which were the first two novels in the trilogy, Molloy and Malone Dies. The third one, The Unnamable, wasn't written yet. And then it took ages for the books to be published because Beckett decided he wanted to translate them himself, which meant rewriting them.

Who were some of the other writers who were important to the early part of your career?
There was Camus. There was Sartre.

Did you have relationships with those guys?
Not with them. Sartre did actually come to New York during that time. But he stayed in a cold-water flat that had no telephone, so it was difficult to communicate and I didn't get to meet him. I was only at the agency for three years before I got drafted into the army. This was in 1950 during the Korean War. I had a choice of serving in the French army or the American army. The French consul told me that I would be better fed and better paid in the American army, so I decided to serve in the American army, and I did for two years. I was sent to Fort Devens for basic training and was put in a Tennessee National Guard unit that had been activated and needed to be brought to full strength with draftees. We were sent to Iceland to defend Keflavik Airport against a possible Communist takeover. This was in the days before jet engines were common and planes couldn't cross the Atlantic without stopping somewhere. When we got to Iceland, the army, which was not any more efficient than publishing, realized there was no one to pay the troops except for a warrant officer who was leaving. They looked for a volunteer to take over the job. Most of the Tennessee boys were totally illiterate and couldn't do arithmetic, so I started paying the troops. And when the air force came in, they kept me because I had all the records. I was in charge of a little division that looked after travel pay. I would compute officers' claims for reimbursements or per diems and so forth. I had two air force people working under me as well as an American civilian girl named Bunny, who I didn't consort with after hours because she'd go to the officers mess and...who knows what she was doing. [Laughter.] Anyway, I was very good at my job and the officers loved me because they usually had a hard time getting their money. As a result of that I got two thirty-day leaves to go to Paris, hitchhiking on air force planes. So I spent two longish periods in Paris and got to meet the French publishers for whom I'd been selling books in America. One was rather terrified when he saw me because he was a member of the Communist party—he was the rights director at Gallimard—and to be seen with someone wearing an American uniform did not give him much pleasure. Those trips were very useful because I'd corresponded with these publishers but I hadn't met them.

When I got out of the army, I'd agreed to go back to the agency for a year, but I didn't really want to. I thought maybe I would work for a publishing house instead. But nobody seemed particularly interested in hiring me because having a language was not considered any more useful than it is now because nobody wanted to do translations. So when I left the agency after another year, I got a letter from the head of one of the French publishing houses, Editions du Seuil, that said, "Should you decide to start your own agency, I'd like you to represent us in America." I was sort of amazed by that because I was shy, I was in my early twenties, I didn't have much self-confidence, and the idea of somebody else having any confidence in me seemed amazing. So I decided to do that, sort of on the side, while also taking advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights and taking courses toward a master's at NYU, where I'd already, at night, gotten a B.A. in English. When I went down to NYU I met a woman in the elevator named Germaine Brée who had just become the head of the French department that day. We started chatting and I said, "Let me know if you ever need somebody to teach a conversation course. I'm very shy and maybe that will help me get over it." She said, "Fine," and the next day her secretary called and said, "You've got three courses." But they weren't conversation courses—they were languages courses. So that's what I did. I got a master's and taught French for six years and did agenting on the side. But I only represented French publishers. No one else was doing that. I would go over catalogues and go to France twice a year, which was tax deductible. Not that there was much to deduct since none of this was bringing in much money. But I was actually being paid by the G.I. Bill—it was different than the World War II G.I. Bill—and I didn't have to pay for my courses since I was a graduate student. I was getting a bit of money from NYU, maybe a thousand dollars a year, a bit of money from the government, and a bit of money from selling the occasional book for very little money.

Tell me about some of the editors you were getting to know.
The one I knew best, and the one who was incredibly nice and generous to me, even before I went into the army, was Mike Bessie, who was then at Harper and later started Atheneum and then went back to Harper. He was very interested in France. He'd been a journalist, he was fluent in French, he'd been in army intelligence in World War II, and he was very cultured. I did, of course, meet Blanche Knopf, who was also fluent in French but knew very little about literature. I was somewhat intimidated by her but I also found her slightly ridiculous. With Sartre she had decided that he was a novelist and a playwright but systematically turned down all of his nonfiction. So all of his essays and philosophical writings were published by minor firms like Philosophical Library or Citadel. When I took him over it was with The Words, which I sold to Braziller. But all of those books should have been with Knopf. I remember having lunch with Blanche. She was extremely gracious. If we had lunch in a restaurant she'd say, "Last year when we had lunch you ordered gigot, but I remember that you like it rare and I don't think they do it very well here. Maybe you should try...." She was sort of amazing in that way. But I also remember having lunch at her apartment, which was in the building where Michael's is now, on Fifty-fifth, where the Italian Pavilion used to be. It would be the two of us and her poodle, Fifi. She'd say, with her raspy smoker's voice, "Mr. Borchardt, what is interesting in Paris right now?" I'd say, "Well, there's Michel Butor, who's just written a new—" She'd lean over and say, "Fifi! Don't do that! This is my Balenciaga suit! I'm not going back to Paris until next spring! You were saying, Mr. Borchardt?" [Laughter.]

What other editors and publishers made a big impression?
I became very close with Bob Gottlieb, who was at Simon & Schuster. He knew French, and his French was particularly fluent if he'd had a drink. At one point later I was very impressed when he decided to memorize the whole of Valéry's "Le Cimetière Marin," which is a very long French poem. That was really quite impressive. He was a junior editor at Simon & Schuster when I started agenting on my own. I had been introduced to someone important at Simon & Schuster, who of course didn't want anything to do with a somewhat useless agent who had practically no books, and she handed me off to Bob, who then called about once a month and said, "They just gave me money to take someone out to lunch. When are you free?" I think he called me so often because he couldn't take out a real agent, who would have been insulted to be seen at lunch with this kid, who not only was fairly young but looked ten years younger. He may have been twenty-five, but he looked fifteen. He wore sneakers when nobody was wearing sneakers. He looked terribly unimportant. And he was fairly unimportant, although by then I think he was already allowed to buy the occasional book. So we would have lunch, sometimes in a restaurant and sometimes in Central Park, and I actually sold him Michel Butor and eventually de Gaulle's war memoirs, even though the first volume had been published by Viking and had done very badly. He also asked me to help out a friend of his named Richard Howard, who stupidly enough had translated a short novel by Jean Giraudoux without checking to make sure the rights were free. But they were, and I got it published by a little firm called Noonday Press, which was an independent house at the time. And then this same Richard Howard started translating other books, many of them for Grove. He also translated de Gaulle's war memoirs for Bob and he got invited to the Elysée in Paris.

So there was Bob. There was also a very smart editor at Knopf who spoke French named Henry Carlisle, who was the father of Michael Carlisle and who later became a writer. But the editors were all sort of in the background. They weren't listed in the Literary Market Place. Editors were considered, by many publishers, a semi-necessary evil who were nearly as unpleasant to deal with as authors or agents. [Laughter.] Agents were at the bottom, then authors, then editors. If all three of them could have been gotten rid of, publishing would have been a nicer, more clubby industry. I remember selling Henry a book called The Notebooks of Major Thompson that became a mini best-seller. Knopf had this little bulletin in which Alfred would write a letter, and in one of them it said, "Next spring we are publishing The Notebooks of Major Thompson by Pierre Daninos, which Blanche snapped up in Paris on her last trip." I remember calling Henry and saying, "This is outrageous! You bought this book here, from me, and you should be the one who gets the credit." He said, "Oh, no, calm down, that's just how it is...." [Laughter.]

I've already mentioned Mike Bessie. I was able to sell him The Last of the Just, which was Atheneum's first best-seller. There were the Wolffs at Pantheon, Kurt and Helen, to whom I tried to sell Night. But nobody wanted Night. I have a letter from Blanche Knopf saying something like, "You're wasting your time with Elie Wiesel. He will never find an audience in this country." I have a long letter from Kurt Wolff, which unfortunately says nothing. It says, "You're right. This is a great book. Usually when you send a book you don't make many comments. I assume that if you're sending it, it means you feel we should publish it. In this case you said it's something we have to publish. And you're right. But for reasons that I'll explain to you the next time we have lunch, we just can't do it." I don't remember if we ever had that lunch or if he ever explained their reasons, so I'm afraid that will be missing from your interview. I could, like most people who write their memoirs, invent a nice story. I've never understood how people can write their memoirs in such detail. I don't remember details about 99 percent of what has happened in my life.

There's Braziller, who bought a lot of French things even though he didn't know French himself. From time to time he would take out an ad in the French equivalent of Publishers Weekly, and many French publishers thought he was one of the biggest American publishers. Dick Seaver worked for him for a while before he moved over to Grove, where I dealt with him a lot because he was Barney [Rosset]'s French guy. Barney knows some French but Seaver was really quite fluent and he'd lived in Paris. Dick and I were friends for years and years.

Do you have any great stories about Dick or Barney?
With Barney the relationship always had its ups and downs. I liked him a lot, and I liked the books he did. I also sold him a lot of books, including Story of O, which, later, during one of his bankruptcies, he had to give to Random House. It's still selling very well. I remember him often being angry at me for one reason or another. I remember complaining to Don Allen once and saying, "What's wrong? I'm bringing him all these books and I'm certainly not hurting him in any way...." Don said something like, "Barney is a rooster. You can't have two roosters in one henhouse." [Laughter.] I think that is sort of true of Barney. But Barney can also be very generous. And I like him.

But there were moments when he would get very angry at me for one thing or another. I remember once going down to Grove Press because they hadn't paid their royalties or something. The first thing Barney said was, "I never bought a book from you that I hadn't heard about before." I said, "That may be true, but you still owe me...." [Laughter.] But to some extent he was probably right. It was sort of irrelevant, but he was probably right because everybody had potentially heard of these French books. They were published in France. And I had heard about them and asked to represent them. Although by then I had exclusive arrangements with several of the publishing houses, two of which we still represent: Seuil, the original one, and Minuit, who have been Beckett's publisher and also publish Elie Wiesel's Night. Night, incidentally, now sells about six hundred thousand copies a year in its Hill and Wang trade paperback edition in America.

How did you meet Elie Wiesel?
I met him because I was trying to sell Night, unsuccessfully. The French publisher wrote to me and said, "Elie Wiesel now lives in New York," where he'd come from Paris to be the UN correspondent of an Israeli newspaper. One day he came over to my apartment, which was also my office at the time, limping with a cane. I thought it was the result of his concentration camp experience but it turned out that he'd been hit by a taxi and broken practically every bone in his body and was still recovering. I have a letter, actually, where I wrote to the French publisher saying, "I met Elie Wiesel and you're right, he seems quite nice." We finally sold the book to Arthur Wang.

How much did you get for it?
Two hundred fifty dollars, payable in two installments and on condition that I find a British partner to share the translation cost.

[Laughter.] How much money do you think they've made on that book?
That's the irony when you see how publishing works. You don't necessarily make the money out of the flavor of the month. The real money, if you're in it for the duration, comes from books like that—from books nobody wanted—be they by William Faulkner or Elie Wiesel or Beckett or many others. Unfortunately, that argument is totally unconvincing to publishers now. If you're an editor at Random House or one of the other large firms, you can't say, "We're not going to make any money on this book for the next three years, but in ten years everybody will be envious of us for having it." The guy you're saying it to has two years to go on his contract, which is about to be renegotiated next year. What good does it do him to have a book that will bring in money ten years from now? He couldn't care less! He wants the book that makes money now so he can tell his bosses, "You should give me another contract for five years at twice the salary." So it's become different, and I think that's what's weighing on publishing, more than any of the other crises that come and go.

Did you become close with Wiesel?
I did. We were both bachelors at the time. We had the kind of relationship where you call up at six o'clock and say, "Are you doing anything tonight? You want to meet at the Italian place on Fifty-sixth?" He lived in a one-room studio on upper Riverside Drive. It wasn't much bigger than this room but it was filled with records and books. For some reason he had a car and would sometimes drive me to the airport. I was living, before getting married to her, with a woman who had been a student of mine at NYU. In Elie's memoirs he says something like, "I drove Georges and Anne to the airport and during the drive Georges mentioned that Anne had decided to change her last name to Borchardt. That's how I found out that they had gotten married." Whether that's true or not, I don't know. It could be. But we had, indeed, gotten married, partly because we found it too complicated not to be married. I would be invited to dinner by, say, Roger Straus. FSG was also buying French books, and Roger had been very nice to me and would invite me to dinner parties at his townhouse with really important people like George Weidenfeld. These were fairly formal dinners and it was awkward to say, "Can I bring a date?" If I was invited it was probably because they were a man short, and by bringing somebody you upset the balance of the dinner. It seemed simpler to be married. People had to invite both of you. So one day we went down to City Hall and got married and then went back to work. [Laughter.]

My wife and I did the same thing.
You probably had the same experience. It gets too cumbersome to always have to explain the situation. And your wife meets people who might ask her out for a date. It's just simpler if you're married. I remember we were at a party, maybe at Henry Carlisle's, and there were several people there. Somebody told Anne about this new firm that was starting: Atheneum. But by the time we got home, she'd forgotten the names of the people who were involved, including the name of the person who had told her, who had also asked her for a date, which she had turned down. I said, "This one you probably should have accepted! I want to know who's starting the firm!" [Laughter.]

Did you make any big mistakes when you were starting out that you look back on with regret?
I probably should have started to take on English language writers sooner. But I was sort of nervous about it. There were all these brilliant agents who had gone to Harvard and were members of the Harvard Club, where all the editors would meet. Everybody in publishing had gone to Harvard. Except the people at Scribner's, who had gone to Princeton. [Laughter.] I was a sort of outsider, and I thought I'd remain an outsider, so it took me a while.

How did you come to represent John Gardner?
We had a group of writers who came more or less at the same time that included Stanley Elkin, Bob Coover, John Gardner, and Sol Yurick. For some reason I seem to remember that Sol Yurick came to us through George Steiner. He was a very close friend of Bob Coover's, who had been with Candida Donadio but became disenchanted with her. Bob had met a marvelous editor named Hal Scharlatt who was at Random House at the time. He had a collection of stories called Pricksongs & Descants. He told Hal Scharlatt that he was sick and tired of agents and wanted to do the deal with him directly. Hal said, "You can't do that. If you do the deal with me directly, I'll have to screw you [on the terms of the contract]." Hal told him to come and see me. To humor Hal, he came to see me, having already decided to tell Hal that it would not work. But for some reason he decided to come to us, and he's been our author ever since. He also sent us Tom Boyle. They tend to come to us through each other. I can't remember exactly how John Gardner came to us.

Tell me about your experience with him.
His editor was David Segal, who was good friends with Hal Scharlatt. They both had been editors at McGraw-Hill and I think both of them had been fired from there. The three of us became friends. We were all sort of outsiders. They were interested in writers whom nobody else wanted, and I was interested in the same writers. And since nobody else wanted them, they were also the only writers I could get, particularly since people would probably discourage American authors from coming to us by saying, "Oh, isn't that the French agent?" If you say that in a certain way it becomes very negative. It took us a while to change that image. So John probably came to us through David Segal. I know that David had published one of John's books by the time John sent us two manuscripts, The Wreckage of Agathon and The Sunlight Dialogues. I also remember, quite vividly, that, being an extremely kind person, I gave Anne the shorter book to read, Wreckage of Agathon, and decided to work my way through the long one, Sunlight Dialogues, not realizing that I'd given myself the much better book. [Laughter.] And I loved that book. By then David Segal had been fired by McGraw and gone to NAL [New American Library]. The person who had fired him at McGraw had just been appointed editor in chief at NAL. David called me and said, "I'll be the first editor to be fired twice by the same person." He had probably called many people saying the same thing, and he didn't actually get fired, but I think agents stopped sending him books because they figured he would. Then he moved to Harper, which always seemed to have, at least briefly, a literary sort of editor, although they were mainly doing nonfiction. And he acquired nothing but duds. Not only did he publish John Gardner, but also Cynthia Ozick and Fred Exley and other people who lost Harper money. So he got fired again. Then he got hired by Bob Gottlieb at Knopf. But while he was at Harper I sent him Wreckage of Agathon and Sunlight Dialogues. He said, "I can do the short book but until this author acquires an audience we wouldn't be able to price the long one." So he only bought Wreckage of Agathon. When he left and went to Knopf, I sent him Grendel and Sunlight Dialogues and he said the same thing. I said, "You can't do that. You have to publish Sunlight, too. If you want to, you can publish Grendel first." So he talked Bob Gottlieb into giving us a two-book contract. They published Grendel, which did quite well—it probably sold about twelve thousand copies, which was good, then or now—and then David died, in his early forties, having pretty much drunk himself to death. Hal Scharlatt died at age thirty-eight, walking off a tennis court. Those were big losses, two superb editors with good taste and good noses. You need instincts in this business. It's so unscientific. You can never really explain why you love something. It's like any other form of love: you can't really explain why you're in love with somebody or something. I think of the often-quoted sentence by Montaigne, when he was asked about his friendship for La Boétie. He said, "Because it was he, because it was I." That's about as close to explaining it as you can get.

Did you become friends with Gardner?
We became good friends. I remember he and his first wife taking our daughter and their two kids to the circus when they were in New York. I remember going to Chinatown with them. They'd just been in Greece, and his daughter was being very obnoxious—she isn't anymore, she's very sweet—and trying to get attention by offering her Greek change to a Chinese vendor. I have letters from John saying, "I know I'm one of the major writers of my generation. All these people who don't recognize me will regret it." Of course he was right, and one of the admirable things about writers is that they really know they're writers. I mean, any normal human being would just give up. Why would you do something that nobody wants? But they do, and they have this sort of inner feeling. He was one of a kind. People often ask me, "What kind of relationship do you have with your authors?" Well, each one is different, just as you have a different relationship with each one of your friends. And you're not exactly the same person for each one of them, either.

Do you have any great stories about Coover?
One amusing story about Bob comes to mind. Some years ago he was asked by the New York Times to write an op-ed piece about the Intifada and Valentine's Day. The dates coincided. It was to run on a Monday, which was Valentine's Day. He called me on Friday evening to say that he had just heard from the editor that they'd killed the piece because some higher-up at the Times objected to its ending, which was something like "as the birds do, do." Evidently the juxtaposition of the two dos was just too much for the Times. So they killed it. Bob asked me what I could do. I said, "What can I do? It's Friday night. Valentine's Day is Monday. The most we can probably do is get a story about what the Times did published in a magazine. But that would be months from now."

I sort of tossed and turned all night, and the next morning I went to the office. It was Saturday morning. I remember that it was snowing. I called Jack Miles, who was also one of our authors and whom I'd met when he was the book review editor at the Los Angeles Times. Now he was a freelance writer for them and he knew everybody there. I told him the story and said, "I know the L.A. Times hates the New York Times. This is a very good piece. Do you think they could run it on Monday?" He said he'd make a phone call. I walked home for lunch in the snow. The minute I got home, Jack called and said they wanted me to fax the piece so they could read it. So I went back through the snow to the office. When I got there I realized I'd never used the fax machine, which at the time was fairly new. So I called Anne on the phone and eventually managed to fax the thing. By then I'd gone back and forth through the snow several times and wasn't in a very good mood. I knew nothing would happen anyway. We were having dinner with friends that night, and five minutes before we went off to dinner, the phone rang. It was the L.A. Times. They said, "We'd like to run the piece, but we can only pay three hundred fifty dollars." Well, the New York Times, at the time, paid two hundred fifty dollars, which I was going to make them pay anyway because they'd really accepted the piece. So now Bob would be getting six hundred instead of two-fifty. I said, "Oh, that's okay." [Laughter.] I remember telling the story at dinner that night. When I was finished my friend's husband said, "But how much money do you make out of this?" I said, "Normally we would have gotten twenty-five dollars before expenses, but this way we get sixty dollars before expenses." He looked at me as if I were totally insane. But to me this was one of the highlights of my career.

You also represent T. C. Boyle. Didn't he say somewhere that in his opinion you are the greatest person who has ever lived?
He tends to exaggerate, a little bit, from time to time. But most of the time he's right, of course. [Laughter.] When I first met him, he was the assistant fiction editor at the Iowa Review and Bob Coover was the fiction editor. But Bob had moved to England and Tom was doing most of the work. I think Tom was impressed by the fact that I was actually submitting short stories to the Iowa Review, which was paying something like thirty-five dollars a story. One day he wrote me and said he had a collection of stories. Many of them had been published in literary journals but also magazines like Esquire, maybe Playboy, but not the New Yorker, which at the time wouldn't have touched any of these authors because they were using words that the New Yorker didn't recognize. And we managed to find a publisher for his collection without too much trouble. Maybe three people turned it down. We sold it to Peter Davison at Atlantic Monthly Press. Then he wrote a novel called Water Music, which was also published by Atlantic. But Peter didn't like his second novel, Budding Prospects, so we had to find him a new publisher. We sold it to Amanda Vaill at Viking. Paul Slovak was the publicity director. He and Tom, both towering over everyone else, got into the habit of hiking together and became good friends. And then Paul later became his editor. Tom doesn't really require much editing. His books come in pretty much ready to go. And Tom and I have become close friends over the years. It's been great fun, and we've been able to get him published all over the world. He's a real writer. I often say to people in the office that the kind of writer I like to take on is somebody whose book you can open to any page, read a paragraph, and say, "Here's a writer."

You also represent one of my favorite nonfiction writers, Tracy Kidder. How did you meet him?
Tracy, too, is a superb stylist. And there, too, we've become good friends. He had written a book for which he had an agent. I don't remember who published it or what it was about, but it was a terrible experience and he doesn't want to hear about that book anymore. Then he wrote Soul of a New Machine, which he sold to Atlantic-Little, Brown himself. I don't know how he got my name, but I remember that he came to see me, feeling that he had made a big mistake, that he should have used an agent, that the publisher wasn't going to do anything for the book. This was before it was published. He was very upset. I said to him, "There isn't much I can do at this point. The first thing you should do is call them and ask what the book's advertising budget is." In those days publishers still had individual budgets for each book. Sometimes it was zero, but they still had it. Now they just advertise their two main books and do nothing for the others. But I told him that, and maybe one or two other things, and within two weeks—I think the book had become a main selection of the Book of the Month Club—he sent me a bottle of wine with his thanks. I had really done nothing. I explained to him that he was more grateful to me for having done nothing than most of my authors were when I actually had done something. [Laughter.]

Then he sent me three proposals for his second book. Two were business books and one was a book about building a house. Well, to me, building a house was of no interest whatsoever. In France, if you want a house, you buy some old stone thing and make something out of it. But putting all this wood together? I don't know. To me it was totally uninteresting. And, in addition, the obvious commercial follow-up to Soul of a New Machine was another business book. So he'd asked me to rank them, and I ranked the two business books first and House third. Two weeks later he called me and said, "You know, House is really the book I would like to write." I said, "That's fine. We'll get you a little less money, but we'll definitely get you a contract. Don't worry about it."

Had Soul of a New Machine already won the Pulitzer?
Probably. I think that had already happened. Anyway, I think he felt a little annoyed by my reaction, and he then produced the most amazing outline I had ever seen for House. I called him and said, "I've changed the ranking. This is now number one and the business books are two and three." How he did it, I don't know. It was an impossible book to write a proposal for because it was going to be an account of what would happen but hadn't happened yet. I got him an enormous contract for the book. He was very surprised. He said, "Are you sure?" and so on. [Laughter.]

How did you sell it? Was it an auction?
No. We just sent it to Atlantic-Little, Brown, which had just been bought by Mort Zuckerman. We asked for a certain amount of money and they reluctantly gave it to us. Mort Zuckerman even came to see me at the time of the negotiation. It didn't start out very well because he saw a copy of Harper's on our reception table and said, "Why do you have Harper's and not the Atlantic?" I said, "Because Harper's is giving us a free subscription and the Atlantic is not." [Laughter.] I thought he wanted to meet because he might want to renegotiate the advance. But not at all. He wanted to see about the possibility of getting first serial rights for the Atlantic. He didn't realize that if they had asked to make that part of the contract I probably would have thrown it in. But they hadn't. [Laughter.] So he went back to Boston with his scalp—that is, my concession that he could have first look at first serial—and I did end up selling them first serial for another twenty-five thousand dollars or so, even though the book itself ended up being published by Houghton Mifflin. We've been Tracy's agents ever since. And he's lovely.

Are there any writers who got away? Whom you wanted desperately?
Oh, many. The one I probably regret most is Jhumpa Lahiri. She would have been perfect for us and vice versa. She just did a marvelous interview with one of our authors, Mavis Gallant, for Granta. I got the impression that Mavis Gallant is her favorite author, and it sort of reopened the wound because I thought, "Did I mention to her that we represent Mavis Gallant? Would that have made a difference?" But maybe not.

You've witnessed such a long arc of contemporary literature. You've seen fads come and go, seen various schools of writing come and go. I'm curious about what seeing all that has taught you about the craft of writing and what makes great writing.
It's a gift, and I don't know where it comes from. I don't think the writing schools bring you that gift. They may help you develop it in some way, and they put you in contact with other writers so that you feel less isolated and less lonely, but essentially what makes a Cézanne a Cézanne or a Picasso a Picasso or a Proust a Proust or a Joyce a Joyce, I don't know. I can't tell you.

So there's nothing specific that you're looking for in a piece of writing?
No. I just want to fall in love with it. Ask an eighteen-year-old kid who tells you that he wants to fall in love, "What do you want to fall in love with?" What is he going to tell you? You don't know until you've found it. But when you find it, you know. How, and why, I don't know.

I'm curious about your take on nonfiction with regard to memoir and the issues of truth and accuracy that are always being raised now, especially because you come from Europe where there are different traditions.
I'm certainly not in favor of lying. I think, basically, that nonfiction should be truthful. There are certain liberties that the reader will accept. It's a sort of silent covenant between the reader and the writer. The reader cannot really expect the author of a memoir to remember absolutely every detail. The reader has to allow the author to say, "It was a very gray morning when I was taken to jail" even if it turns out to have been a sunny day if you look up the weather in the almanac. I don't think that sort of thing really matters. There are things that are more and less important. But I don't think the author should deliberately lie to the reader.

I recently read a rather interesting book that the author quite honestly calls a novel. It's been published in France but doesn't exist in English. It's by the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, and it's a book about his mother. His mother was not literate. She was married twice, had several children, and lived a long life. He wanted to tell her story, about how she was sort of married off. He says himself that she wasn't going to tell him the whole truth, and he had no way of finding it out. She's not a historical figure. There are no records. He said, "I'm telling the story as I see it, and I'm filling in some of the details with what I imagine it must have been like." That, I think, is fine. Even if he didn't call it a novel—which it isn't, totally, either—all he has to do is write a brief foreword to explain how he approached the story. He's not cheating. He's just giving his subject a bit more body and substance. And there is a truth that you can find in fiction that is just as powerful as the truth you find in nonfiction.

But you can't change things. I feel very strongly—it's one of my strongest feelings, I think—about lying. I absolutely hate lying. But we all lie in a way. As I'm talking to you, I'm not telling you everything I think. Nor are you telling me everything you think. But I don't consider that lying. It's part of social discourse. I lied constantly during the war, but it was a question of survival. I think that's fine. It's unfortunate, but I had no choice. But I despise gratuitous lies or lies that are meant to make you sound better than you are or, in a book, add more panache to a story that might not work otherwise. If you need to do that, you should write fiction. It's a question of not betraying the trust of the reader. But the fact that there's an error? That doesn't bother me at all. The writer says there were eight people at the party and it turns out there were twelve? I couldn't care less. We don't have perfect memories. You probably haven't been married very long, but you will find out that when you go to parties, your wife will tell a story about something that you remember being totally different. There may be elements that are the same, but it didn't happen when you were in St. Louis, it was when you were in Ottawa. As you get older there will be more and more of those things. You will also realize that you're not 100 percent sure that you're totally right either. And in the end it doesn't matter. In the early part of your marriage, which you're still in, you will still tell your wife, "That isn't the way it happened!" But after a few years you'll realize that it really makes absolutely no difference.

Let's talk a little about the industry. You've been in it for several decades, over the course of which it's changed a lot, or at least that's what people seem to say. What's your take on that?
It has changed. Mainly it's the shift from individual ownership to corporate ownership. The individuals who owned the firms were, for the most part, the sons of millionaires. They didn't need to take money out of the firm. They lived well before, they lived well during, and they had something very valuable afterward. Knopf became very valuable. Farrar, Straus became very valuable. So the heirs, I suppose, got a good amount of money. But the purpose [of founding those firms] wasn't really to make money. The purpose was the excitement of publishing. It's totally different now. Not so much at Grove/Atlantic or Norton—those are two firms for which what I'm saying doesn't apply—except that they are competing against these giants. So if Grove/Atlantic has a book that becomes a major best-seller, it can't hold on to the author, even if the author has made lots of protestations about how he will never leave the firm because he's in love with all the people who work there. Either he, or his agent, or both, will decide that rather than taking a million from little Grove/Atlantic, they're better off taking six million from somebody bigger. So they are affected by it too. The corporate thing has sort of poisoned the whole industry.

What has that meant for writers?
It's mainly meant that they've become products. And that their main relationship is more with their literary agent. In a way it has worked well for the agents. Their main relationship is much more seldom with the editor because the editor's position is very precarious. You've already changed jobs like four times. That was most unusual when I started in publishing. If you were an editor at Knopf, you stayed an editor at Knopf. There are still editors at Knopf who have been there forever: Judith Jones; Ash Green, who just retired; Bill Koshland, who was not an editor but more the business person. When Bill was chairman emeritus, well after Alfred had died and Bob Gottlieb had taken over, he would still take all the royalty statements home and look at them to be sure they were right. Now there's no one on the editorial side of a publishing house who even sees the royalty statements. They have no idea what's on them. They have no idea whether the reserve for returns is outrageous or justified. The person who decides on the reserve doesn't know either. The whole climate has changed.

What else has it meant for writers?
Even the little things have changed. There used to be a publication date for a book. Now nobody even knows what the publication date is except when there's an embargo. The pub date used to mean the author would get a bouquet of roses or there would be a party. There was practically always a party for the author. The birth of the book was something to be celebrated. Now it's just the question of "Do we admit to the author that the actual printing is only one-fourth of the announced printing?" It's totally different. In fact, even the idea of two different figures for printings—the announced printing and the actual printing—has come with corporate publishing. Before, you printed a certain number of copies and that was what you printed. There wasn't the lie and the truth.

You've always been a champion of so-called midlist writers. Has it become more difficult for those writers to sustain their careers today?
I think publishers used to be more committed to a specific author. But not always. I think the authors who are really successful are even more successful today, in financial terms. Among our authors, people like Tracy Kidder or Ian McEwan or T. C. Boyle. The authors like Stanley Elkin always had to support themselves by teaching and would have to today. So that isn't very different except for the fact that maybe they see one of their students being offered a six-figure advance all of a sudden because he or she is doing something that a publisher thinks it can really sell. Now, if the book doesn't work, that's the end of that career, half the time.

It's different. As I've already told you with examples like Beckett and Elie Wiesel, the doors were not wide open to those people either. The success of Grove Press, when it started, was due to the fact that there were all of these marvelous authors who nobody else wanted. Evergreen Review was a marvelous enterprise that not only opened its doors to interesting writers but also fed writers into the publishing company. Nobody has that kind of thing now, even though Evergreen Review was not unique at the time. There was also Ted Solotaroff's American Review and New American Review. I think Ted was the first to publish Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, Kate Millett. These publications were very, very important, and there's nothing like that now. There isn't any publisher who's really interested in doing that—in nursing these seedlings and planning for the future. Everybody wants instant gratification. So of course that has affected the authors too.

But, in general, good authors have always been fairly miserable. They are now. They were then. It's always been a somewhat alien existence. Most authors still need to have a profession, usually in academia but not always, to sustain themselves. Especially the better ones, who don't want to compromise and just want to write what they feel like writing. But I don't think it has become much more difficult. It has always been difficult. I would not advise any of my friends to become writers as a career.

I think you're an artist because you have to be an artist. I don't think it's ever been easy. It's not easy for musicians. It's not easy for painters. But it has never been easy for those people. When Cézanne showed his first paintings, people laughed at him. They thought they were ludicrous. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime. To be an artist has always been difficult. To be an artist in the United States has been probably even more difficult than elsewhere because the arts are not considered all that valuable here.

If somebody asks you what you do and you say, "I'm a writer," the next question will be, "But what do you do for a living?"