Literary Agents in the Transatlantic Book Trade

Cottenet, Cécile

doi:10.4324/9781315558844

Cited by 17 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Thus, literary agents have only fairly recently garnered interest when it comes to the contemporary period (Thompson; Murray) while studies had previously covered their rise in nineteenth-century Britain (Hepburn; Gillies). The international perimeters of such an intermediation in the twentieth century still remain unexplored, with a few exceptions (Cottenet 2017b).…”

Section: Intermediaries In the Communications Circuitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…He gradually turned into a sub-agent-that is to say liaising for foreign agencies such as Curtis Brown in London and New York-and ultimately an agent for writers he represented as his own clients. Bradley's agency thus grew into a sizable business in the 1920s with little competition at home until Michel Hoffman founded his own agency in Paris in 1934 (Cottenet, 2017b). Existing studies about literary agents and the networks they participated in show that the rise of the profession in nineteenthcentury Britain responded to conditions of modernization and internationalization of the publishing industry similar to those that echo Bradley's own trajectory and environment in interwar Paris (Barnes; Gillies; Joseph).…”

Section: Intermediaries In the Communications Circuitmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“They paved the Atlantic with books”: William and Jenny Bradley, literary agents and cultural passeurs across borders

Cossu-Beaumont¹

2023

transatlantica

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the other, to name a few. But this list of names does not suffice to capture the many contributions of the two agents to literary and cultural history and to the French-American relationship.Born in Hartford, Connecticut to a patrician family and educated at Columbia University, William Bradley, an editor, translator, poet, and homme de lettres, crossed the Atlantic as a First World War Lieutenant and settled permanently in Paris in 1919. He married Jenny Serruys, a Belgian-French translator and anglophile whose family had ties with the Parisian literary and political elite through their amicable connections with, among others, writer Anatole France and statesman Georges Clemenceau.In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, William Bradley initially acted as a scout for the American publisher Harcourt, Brace and Howe (1920), and then for Macmillan (1921) and Knopf (1922). After 1923, the Bradleys quickly gained prominence, becoming the principal contacts for the main publishing houses in New York and Paris, and pillars of the Parisian social life for locals, expatriates, and visitors alike. The New Yorker's chronicler Janet Flanner called William Bradley a "prophet" (Flanner 60-61) and later offered the image of a transatlantic route built by the couple who, she suggested, "paved the Atlantic with books." 2 Gertrude Stein described Bradley "They paved the Atlantic with books": William and Jenny Bradley, literary age...

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Section: Intermediaries In the Communications Circuitmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Intermediaries In the Communications Circuitmentioning

confidence: 99%