Chronicling the story of literary agents in the United States from the 1950s to today, Laura McGrath uncovers their critical role in the making of American literature in Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of Contemporary American Literature. From the famed three-martini lunch to the Frankfurt Book Fair, Middlemen takes readers behind the scenes to show how agents influence what we read. Weaving together original archival research, data analysis, and interviews with scores of agents and other publishing professionals, Middlemen demonstrates that agents—eighty percent of whom are in fact women—are much more than “middlemen.” As intermediaries between author and publisher, agents act as advocates, matchmakers, negotiators, and tastemakers, and they must balance artistic values with the commercial imperatives of publishing conglomerates.

Laura B. McGrath is writer, literary historian, and data scientist. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, she was the Associate Director of the Literary Lab at Stanford University. A former Kennedy Fellow with the Smithsonian Institute of American History, her work has been supported by the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, and the Big Ten.

Laura has written on books, publishing history, and data for The Atlantic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. Her book, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press), draws on a range of methods- data analysis, close reading, literary ethnography- to reveal the literary agent's centrality in the development of American literature, post-1945.