Andrew Wylie (born 1947), known as The Jackal, is an American
literary agent.
Early life
Wylie is the son of Craig Wylie (1908–1976), one time editor-in-chief at
Houghton Mifflin
The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
Computer scientists and mathematicians often voc ...
, and Angela (1915–1989), daughter of the landscape architect and artist Robert Ludlow Fowler, Jr, of Oatlands, New York (son of judge Robert Ludlow Fowler, author of many legal texts).
His grandfather, Yale-educated lawyer Horace Wylie, left his wife and children to marry the poet and novelist
Elinor (née Hoyt), then Mrs Philip Simmons Hichborn, seventeen years his junior, causing a scandal; Horace was son of the federal judge
Andrew Wylie and grandson of
Rev. Andrew Wylie, first President of
Indiana University
Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana.
Campuses
Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI.
*Indiana Universi ...
.
Wylie grew up in
Sudbury, Massachusetts, and attended
St. Paul's School in
Concord, New Hampshire, from which he was dismissed in 1965; an interview with his university alumni magazine stated that this was for arranging illicit excursions to Boston for fellow students and supplying them, illegally, with alcohol.
Poet
In 1972, Wylie published a short collection of poetry, ''Yellow Flowers''. Many of the verses cited in public sources are sexually explicit in nature. In a 2007 interview, fellow agent
Ira Silverberg suggested that Wylie has since attempted to acquire the remaining copies of the collection.
Wylie himself denied this allegation, describing ''Yellow Flowers'' as a "youthful indiscretion".
[Grove, Lloyd (December 14, 2007)]
"World According to... Andrew Wylie"
'' Portfolio.com''. Retrieved August 20, 2010. .
Literary agent
Wylie founded the literary agency named after him in New York in 1980. He opened a second office in London in 1996.
It now represents more than 1,000 clients and literary estates. For his business tactics, Wylie has been nicknamed "The Jackal".
Some of Wylie's clients
[
] include:
*
Martin Amis
*
Alessandro Baricco
Alessandro Baricco (; born 25 January 1958) is an Italian writer, director and performer. His novels have been translated into a wide number of languages.
Early life, family and education
Baricco was born in Turin, Italy.
He has earned degre ...
*
John Barth
John Simmons Barth (; born May 27, 1930) is an American writer who is best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include ''The Sot-Weed Factor'', a sa ...
*The
Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the ''Houston Post'', was managing ...
Estate
*The
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos (; 28 April 1953 – 15 July 2003) was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel ''Los detectives salvajes'' ('' The Savage Detectives ...
Estate
*The
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known bo ...
Estate
*The
Guillermo Cabrera Infante Estate
*The
Albert Camus
Albert Camus ( , ; ; 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, and journalist. He was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His work ...
Estate
*The
Raymond Carver
Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. He contributed to the revitalization of the American short story during the 1980s.
Early life
Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mil ...
Estate
*The
John Cheever Estate
*The
Philip K. Dick Trust
*The
Yasunari Kawabata
was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal a ...
Estate
*
Karl Ove Knausgård
Karl Ove Knausgård (; born 6 December 1968) is a Norwegian author. He became known worldwide for six autobiographical novels, titled ''My Struggle'' (''Min Kamp'').
Since the completion of the ''My Struggle'' series in 2011, he has also publis ...
*
Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera (, ; born 1 April 1929) is a Czech writer who went into exile in France in 1975, becoming a naturalised French citizen in 1981. Kundera's Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, then conferred again in 2019. He "sees himself ...
*The
Elmore Leonard Estate
*The
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (russian: link=no, Владимир Владимирович Набоков ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Bo ...
Literary Foundation
*
New York Review Books
New York Review Books (NYRB) is the publishing division of ''The New York Review of Books''. Its imprints are New York Review Books Classics, New York Review Books Collections, The New York Review Children's Collection, New York Review Comics, Ne ...
*The
Patrick O'Brian
Patrick O'Brian, CBE (12 December 1914 – 2 January 2000), born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and cent ...
Estate
*
Kenzaburo Oe
*The
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short story writer.
Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophicall ...
Estate
*
Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (; born 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and We ...
*The
José Saramago
José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE ComSE GColCa (; 16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010), was a Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony ith which hec ...
Estate
*The
W. G. Sebald Estate
*
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman (; born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman on February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel '' Maus''. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines ''Arcade'' and '' Ra ...
*The
Hunter S. Thompson Estate
*The
Tomasi di Lampedusa Estate
*The
John H. Updike Literary Trust
* The
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and ...
Estate
*
Mo Yan
Guan Moye (; born 17 February 1955), better known by the pen name Mo Yan (, ), is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine ''TIME'' referred to him as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirate ...
*The
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires ''Decli ...
Estate
*The
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...
Foundation
*The
C. V. Wedgwood Estate
Throughout his career as a literary agent, Wylie has attracted attention for poaching clients from other agents.
In 1995
Martin Amis left his agent of 22 years,
Pat Kavanagh, for Wylie, who was reported to have secured an advance of £500,000 for Amis's novel ''
The Information''.
In July 2010, Wylie launched a new business,
Odyssey Editions
The ''Odyssey'' (; grc, Ὀδύσσεια, Odýsseia, ) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the ''Iliad'', the ...
, to publish
e-book
An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Alt ...
s. The first twenty titles were launched on 21 July, available exclusively from
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...
. Wylie's friendly attitude towards Amazon was short-lived, though; in 2014 he advised: "If you have a choice between the plague and Amazon, pick the plague." He later went on to liken Amazon's tactics to those of the
Islamic State
An Islamic state is a State (polity), state that has a form of government based on sharia, Islamic law (sharia). As a term, it has been used to describe various historical Polity, polities and theories of governance in the Islamic world. As a t ...
.
References
External links
Corporate websiteVictor Bockris and Andrew Wylie Collectionat the
Harry Ransom Center
The Harry Ransom Center (until 1983 the Humanities Research Center) is an archive, library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the collection of literary and cultural artifacts from the Americas and Europe for the pur ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wylie, Andrew
1947 births
Harvard College alumni
Literary agents
Living people
St. Paul's School (New Hampshire) alumni