Literary agent Georges Borchardt, who championed Nobel laureates, dies at 97

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NEW YORK (AP) — Georges Borchardt, a literary agent of cosmopolitan taste and style who found U.S. publishers for future Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel and Samuel Beckett and represented dozens of other prize-winning authors, from Ian McEwan to Tracy Kidder, has died at age 97.

Georges Borchardt Inc., the agency he founded in 1967, said he died Sunday in Manhattan, “peacefully at home surrounded by family, including his beloved wife and business partner of over 60 years, Anne Borchardt.” His wife told The Associated Press he died in his sleep, and cited no cause beyond his age.

Few agents were as successful and as beloved as Borchardt, once praised by author T.C. Boyle as “the most wonderful man who ever lived on this earth.” Borchardt helped introduce English-language readers to Eugene Ionesco, Marguerite Duras and other leading French writers and was an early enthusiast for two French-language works that became international classics — Wiesel's “Night” and Beckett's “Waiting for Godot.”

A champion of texts old and new, he managed the literary estates of Beckett, Aldous Huxley and Tennessee Williams. When Princeton University scholar Robert Fagles was struggling to get his translation of Homer's “The Iliad” released, Borchardt stepped in and negotiated a deal with Viking. Fagles went on to complete acclaimed and bestselling editions of “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey” and “The Aeneid.”

Other clients at the agency, which he ran with his wife and his daughter, Valerie, included Claire Messud, poets John Ashbery and Robert Bly, feminist Kate Millett and the critic-novelist Stanley Crouch. Borchardt was a former board member of PEN America and president of the Association of Authors' Representatives. In 2010, France awarded him the insignia of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

Borchardt was lucky to survive childhood. A native of Berlin who moved to Paris as a boy, Borchardt lost his father to cancer at 11 and lost his mother when she and other Jews were deported to Auschwitz. During World War II, Borchardt lived as a “nonperson” in Aix-en-Provence, where his name appeared on no official rolls and soldiers marched in the yard outside the school in which he hid.

He emigrated to the U.S. in 1947 and though unable to speak English, taught French at New York University and found work at the Marion Saunders literary agency after placing an advertisement in The New York Times. Assigned to acquire French releases for U.S. publishers, he faced the challenge of Charles de Gaulle's memoirs, written in three volumes. Houghton Mifflin agreed to release them, only for the French statesman to refuse because they also worked with his British peer, Winston Churchill. Viking published the first volume, but dropped out when it sold poorly. Simon & Schuster eventually published the whole set.

In 1953, Borchardt learned about “three books by this Irishman who was writing in French called Beckett,” he told Poets & Writers magazine in 2009. “I read them and thought, ‘This is really quite interesting.’ I started sending them around — they were in French — and I'd get letters saying, you know, ‘Pale imitator of (James) Joyce’ or ‘Unreadable prose.’”

The books were “Godot” and the novels “Malloy” and “Malone Dies,” and they were viewed more favorably by Barney Rosset of Grove Press, emerging at the time as a leading publisher of avant-garde authors. Rosset and Borchardt agreed to a $1,000 — $400 each for the novels and just $200 for “Godot” since it was assumed at the time that fewer people read plays.

“And then it took ages for the books to be published because Beckett decided he wanted to translate them himself, which meant rewriting them,” Borchardt told Poets and Writers.

In the late 1950s, Borchardt tried to interest publishers in a brief, novelistic memoir released in France about a boy's horrifying coming-of-age in a concentration camp — Wiesel's “Night.” Borchardt initially faced rejection because the industry was reluctant to take on Holocaust stories, despite the success of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” he told The New York Times in 2008.

“It is, as you say, a horrifying and extremely moving document,” an editor at Scribner wrote to Borchardt, he said. “However, we have certain misgivings as to the size of the American market for what remains … a document.”

Hill and Wang, now an imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, signed the book for $250, “payable in two installments and on condition that I find a British partner to share the translation cost,” Borchardt recalled. “Night” was published in English in 1960, sold millions of copies and launched Wiesel's career as author, activist and humanitarian.

Borchardt was drawn to fiction and nonfiction, whether experimental novelist Robert Coover or Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist-historian Anne Applebaum. He never worried about current trends and liked to say he had no formula beyond picking material he would have read anyway.

“I just want to fall in love with it,” he told Poets & Writers. “Ask an 18-year-old kid who tells you that he wants to fall in love, ‘What do you want to fall in love with?’ What is he going to tell you? You don't know until you've found it. But when you find it, you know.”