The Literary Agent’s Invisible Hand

The literary agent is a mysterious and camera-shy creature, rustling busily in the literary undergrowth, her tracks visible only to those familiar with the species and its habits. If we were in the mood to further pursue this metaphor, we might compare her to one of those small but weirdly powerful wild cats one might glimpse in an episode of Planet Earth, only about knee-high but capable of causing great scurrying and alarm merely by swishing her tail. As Laura McGrath, a literary historian, argues in Middlemen, her history of the profession, “no figure has been more significant, and yet more invisible, in American literature than the literary agent.”