Who

Admired and loathed in equal measure, Andrew Wylie is one of New York's most powerful—and ruthless—literary agents.

Backstory

The son of a Boston heiress and a Houghton Mifflin editor, Wylie moved to New York shortly after picking up a degree in French literature from Harvard, falling into Andy Warhol's downtown scene after he finagled a meeting with the artist by posing as a journalist and pretending to interview him. Wylie flirted with bohemia for a few years—he drove a cab, did drugs, and spent many nights sleeping on the floor of various friends' apartments. He eventually cleaned up his act and set up his own literary agency from his apartment when he was 31.

The first few years were slow going as he carved out a niche as an agent to "respectable" authors, eschewing anyone he deemed too commercial or popular (a strategy he's maintained). But he eventually started making a name for himself, and in 1986 he partnered with a London agency and sold off a 50% stake in his firm. Two years later, he landed his most famous client when he successfully wooed Salman Rushdie, who had recently completed the first 100 pages of a new novel called The Satanic Verses. By the '90s, Wylie had turned his boutique into one of the world's top agencies. In 1996, he bought out his English partner and opened his own office in London, where he spends one week each month.

Of note

Wylie's client list is one of the most impressive and prestigious around: Over the years, he's repped Philip Roth, Italo Calvino, John Cheever, Oliver Sacks, Norman Mailer, Martin Amis, Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow—and he makes no bones about the fact that he's a huge literary snob. But he also has a reputation as one of the fiercest and toughest agents in town, having earned the nickname "the Jackal" for his ruthless ways and stop-at-nothing tactics to get the clients he's after. He signed up former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto solely to impress Salman Rushdie; in 1995, after judiciously giving Martin Amis's cousin a job in his office, Wylie famously stole the Brit novelist away from his long-time agent, Pat Kavanagh—the wife of Amis's close friend Julian Barnes, who denounced Wylie as "a card-carrying shit."

Wylie has also ruffled feathers in the genteel world of publishing with his demands for massive advances; he's long operated on the premise that a publisher will only give a big push to a book if there's major cash at stake. (Not that publishers always succumb: When Wylie insisted on a certain sum for Philip Roth from his longtime editor Roger Straus, Straus recalls telling the agent "to go fuck himself.") But the majority of the time, the Jackal lands unparalleled paydays for his clients: He pulled in an $800,000 advance for Amis for The Information and more than a $1 million for Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Regarded with affection, however, Wylie is not. Writer Daphne Merkin has described him as "a sociopath," while a Guardian journalist remarked that "he does have the air of a man who looks as if he could enjoy a meat-based snack of anyone, a journalist, say, who ended up on the wrong side of him."

For the record

Wylie represents both Sam Tanenhaus and Dwight Garner, the editor-in-chief and the senior editor of the New York Times Book Review, respectively. Naturally, it's claimed that no favorable treatment is conferred upon their fellow Wylie Agency clients.

Personal

Wylie is on his second marriage. He has two daughters and a son, the latter of whom works at his agency. The Wylies live on the Upper East Side (in the same building as interior designer Victoria Hagan) and have a summer home in Water Mill bought for $2.3 million for in 1999.

No joke

In 1972, several years before he turned to agenting, Wylie published a chapbook of poems entitled Yellow Flowers. Some of the names of the poems contained in the volume: "Hands up Your Skirt" and "I Fuck Your Ass, You Suck My Cock." Copies of booklet are hard to come by: According to proud owner and fellow agent Ira Silverberg, Wylie had tried to buy up all the remaining copies of the work.