![]() ![]() Fame magnified a drinking problem that killed him by 1969. In 1957, the book was released, The New York Times raved and “On the Road” soon entered the American canon.īut Kerouac was a shy and fragile man, Lord wrote. An editor from Viking Press contacted Lord, offering an advance of $900. The agent eventually sold excerpts to The Paris Review and the periodical New World Writing. But this is not a well-made novel, nor a saleable one nor even, I think, a good one.”īy 1955, Kerouac was ready to give up - but Lord was not. One editor wrote to Lord that “Kerouac does have enormous talent of a very special kind. Even younger editors who may have related to Kerouac’s jazzy celebration of youth and personal freedom turned him down. Lord believed that Kerouac had “a fresh, distinctive voice that should be heard.” But the industry was not in the mood. Kerouac already had completed a conventional novel, “The Town and the City,” but had no agent and surely needed one for his next book: “On the Road” was typed, as Lord was among the first to know, “on a 120-foot scroll of architectural tracing paper.” In his 2013 memoir “Lord of Publishing,” Lord remembered first meeting Kerouac in 1952. Lord had quick success by selling film rights to two popular sports books, Rocky Graziano’s “Somebody Up There Likes Me” and Jimmy Piersall’s “Fear Strikes Out.” But Lord’s “On the Road” quest would prove bumpier. “Frankly, I didn’t want to deal with the situation at home,” he told the Des Moines Register in 2015. His first marriage, he would acknowledge, helped inspire him to go into business for himself. He also prided himself on his sympathy for writers who lived far more wildly than he did. Lord had met many agents during his magazine years and believed they failed to understand that the American public was becoming more urban and sophisticated. Back in the U.S., he served as an editor at True and Cosmopolitan, from which he was fired, before founding the Sterling Lord Literary Agency. His upbringing, he would later write, was the kind of “pleasant, orderly” world “the Beats were trampling on in the fifties and sixties.”Īfter serving in the Army Air Force during World War II, Lord co-owned the Germany-based magazine Weekend, which soon folded. He also became a tennis star at Grinnell College, and later a good enough player to compete against Don Budge, among others. It began when his mother would read to him after dinner he went on to edit his high school newspaper and work as a sports stringer around the same time for the Des Moines Register. Lord was married four times, and had one child, Rebecca.īooks and tennis were lifelong passions for Lord, born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1920. Lord instead found a deal for “Quotations from Chairman LBJ,” a bestselling parody. Johnson’s “The Vantage Point,” ultimately published in 1971, was dismissed by critics as bland and uninformative. ![]() Lord turned them down, much to their surprise and anger. Representatives for the former president informed Lord in the late 1960s that Johnson wanted $1 million for the book and that Lord should accept less than his usual commission for the honor of working with him. Lord would also speak proudly of a project he declined: Lyndon Johnson’s memoir. And third, I’ve been able to meet some extraordinarily interesting people.” Second, I am interested in new and good ideas. “A number of things about this business have really caught me and made it a compelling interest,” Lord told the AP in 2013. Some of the great sports books of the 20th century, from “North Dallas Forty” to “Secretariat,” were written by his clients. ![]() Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Judge John Sirica of Watergate fame and worked often with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis during her time as an editor with Doubleday and Viking. Kerouac declined, but Lord was so impressed by the book that he ended up representing Kesey for his next work, “Sometimes a Great Notion.” In the early 1960s, Viking had asked Lord to get a blurb from Kerouac for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Kesey’s first and most famous novel. He negotiated terms between McGinniss and accused killer Jeffrey MacDonald, later convicted, for the true crime classic “Fatal Vision.” He found a publisher for Nicholas Pileggi’s mob story “Wiseguy” and helped arrange the deal for its celebrated film adaptation, “Goodfellas.” Seuss, Lord helped launch Stan and Jan Berenstain’s multimillion-selling books about an anthropomorphic bear family. Thanks to his friendship with Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. ![]()
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