Sterling Lord, who for more than 60 years was one of New York's most successful and durable literary agents, died September 3. He was 102. The New York Times reported that although the list of well-known writers he represented is long, "his success began with an unknown named Jack Kerouac and his hard-to-sell novel On the Road."
Lord was a fledgling Manhattan literary agent in 1952 when Kerouac "walked timidly into his office, a basement studio on East 36th Street, just off Park Avenue.... Inside Kerouac's weather-beaten knapsack and wrapped in a newspaper, Mr. Lord recalled, was a manuscript that Kerouac handed gingerly to him. It took Mr. Lord four years to sell the book, for a measly $1,000. But at last count, On the Road has sold five million copies and burned just as many gallons of gas as generations of young people have set out in search of either the America Kerouac saw or the ones that have taken its place," the Times wrote.
In 1987, Lord joined the agent Peter Matson to form Sterling Lord Literistic. Although Lord gradually yielded day-to-day management of the company and eventually sold his stock, "he continued to work, and into his 90s remained the highest-earning agent in the office," the Times noted, adding that his "last years with the agency were unhappy, however, as he came to feel that some of his colleagues were undermining him. In 2019, though suffering from the macular degeneration that had stopped his tennis game, he set up a new literary agency on his own."
The late Joe McGinniss said in 2013 that "Sterling's career encapsulated the rise and fall of literary nonfiction in post-World War II America. He was the last link to what we can now see not so much as a Golden Age, but as a brief, shining moment when long-form journalism mattered in a way it no longer does and may never again."
His client list included Jimmy Breslin, Art Buchwald, Willie Morris, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Howard Fast, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gordon Parks, Edward M. Kennedy, Robert S. McNamara, Frank Deford, David Wise, Nicholas Pileggi, Jeff Greenfield, Ken Kesey and the Berenstain Bears, among many others.
Lord "embraced Merry Pranksters and mobsters as well as more conventional types," the Times wrote, noting that his clients "appreciated his gentility, which appeared in ever-sharper relief as the book business became increasingly commercial and cutthroat. Dining with him, Mr. Greenfield recalled in another 2013 email, 'you felt as if you were in a different time--as if Maxwell Perkins might show up for coffee.' "
"A number of things about this business have really caught me and made it a compelling interest," Lord told the AP in 2013. "First, I'm interested in good writing. Second, I am interested in new and good ideas. And third, I've been able to meet some extraordinarily interesting people."