Literary agent Georges Borchardt, champion of Beckett and Wiesel, dies at 97

Georges Borchardt, the influential literary agent who helped shape the path of major international writers for U.S. readers, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 97.

Borchardt founded Georges Borchardt Inc. in 1967 with his wife, Anne Borchardt, and over decades represented dozens of prize-winning authors, including Ian McEwan and Tracy Kidder, as well as Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel and Samuel Beckett. The agency said he died “peacefully at home surrounded by family,” and Anne Borchardt told The Associated Press he died in his sleep, citing no cause beyond his age.

Borchardt’s career carried early, difficult context. He was born in Berlin and moved to Paris as a boy. He lost his father to cancer at 11 and later 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, with his name omitted from official rolls and soldiers marching in the yard outside the school where he hid.

After emigrating to the United States in 1947, Borchardt taught French at New York University and later worked at the Marion Saunders literary agency, where he placed an advertisement in The New York Times. In that role, he was assigned to acquire French releases for U.S. publishers, including a major challenge: Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs in three volumes. Houghton Mifflin agreed to release the memoirs, but de Gaulle declined because the books were also associated with Winston Churchill, and Viking later dropped out after sales of the first volume. Simon & Schuster eventually published the full set.

Borchardt’s early advocacy for Samuel Beckett’s work helped build a longer arc for the playwright and novelist in English. In 1953, Borchardt learned about “three books by this Irishman who was writing in French called Beckett,” and began circulating them despite criticism, including letters calling the work “Pale imitator of (James) Joyce” and “Unreadable prose,” as he described later to Poets & Writers. The books were Beckett’s “Godot” and the novels “Malloy” and “Malone Dies,” and Borchardt and Grove Press editor Barney Rosset agreed to a $1,000 deal—$400 each for the novels and $200 for “Godot,” based on assumptions at the time that fewer people read plays.

His work also reflected how publication timelines could depend on the author’s control. Borchardt later told Poets & Writers that “it took ages” for Beckett’s books to be published in the United States because Beckett decided he wanted to translate them himself, which meant rewriting. “Night” brought similar risk and persistence. Borchardt tried, in the late 1950s, to interest publishers in Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, initially facing rejection because the industry was reluctant to take on Holocaust stories. Borchardt told The New York Times in 2008 that editors were wary of “the size of the American market” for what remained “a document,” a sentiment he attributed to a Scribner editor who wrote to him.

Hill and Wang, now an imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, eventually signed “Night” for $250, payable in two installments and tied to Borchardt’s finding a British partner to share translation costs, Borchardt recalled. “Night” was published in English in 1960, sold millions of copies, and helped launch Wiesel’s career as an author, activist and humanitarian, according to Borchardt’s account.

Beyond Wiesel and Beckett, Borchardt’s agency managed literary estates and helped bring both old and new work to market. The Associated Press reported that he managed the literary estates of Beckett, Aldous Huxley and Tennessee Williams, and that when Princeton University scholar Robert Fagles struggled to get his translation of Homer’s “The Iliad” released, Borchardt negotiated a deal with Viking. Fagles went on to complete acclaimed and bestselling editions of “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey” and “The Aeneid.”

The Associated Press also cited a long client list at the agency run with his wife and their daughter, Valerie, including Claire Messud, poets John Ashbery and Robert Bly, feminist Kate Millett, and critic-novelist Stanley Crouch. Borchardt served as a former board member of PEN America and president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, and in 2010 France awarded him the insignia of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. The Associated Press noted that author T.C. Boyle once praised him as “the most wonderful man who ever lived on this earth.”