Andrew Wylie

Wylie, whose father was a high-level editor at Houghton Mifflin, grew up a privileged young scalawag, attending St. Paul’s School, from which he was dismissed, and Harvard. eventually moved to New York in the 1970s to become a poet and interviewer. Once there, he fell in with Andy Warhol’s crowd, behaved in various ways like a wild man and then, in 1980 and in need of steadier work, began transforming himself into a hugely successful literary agent. Over the years, the Wylie Agency’s clients have included Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Martin Amis and John Updike. (All of whose estates, along with those of other luminaries like Borges and Calvino, are now represented by the agency.) Wylie’s roster of contemporary authors includes Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Karl Ove Knausgaard among its blue-chip multitude. Such voracious acquisition of clients at one point led to Wylie’s being called the Jackal, presumably for his ruthless pursuit of other agents’ authors. His firm now represents more than represent about 1,500 writers and/or their estates.