Why the first literary agents choose to work for the author rather than for the publisher?

Abstract

The literary agent is an important figure of the publishing world as he plays the role of an intermediary between the publisher and the author. Within time the agent slowly switches to the author's side and starts to work for his interest. This transition is more tangible during the late 20th century but it begins a few years after the establishment of the profession in the late 19th century in Britain and America. Therefore it is interesting and important to understand what are the reasons that provoked the agent to pick a side at such an early stage of establishing the profession. The current thesis answer this question by examining the first professional literary agents in Britain (Alexander Pollock Watt) and in America (Paul Revere Reynolds), including the reasons for their emergence, their biographies and working templates. By doing so, the inner and outer factors prompting the transition become clear: both agents take advantage of the shifts in publishing legislation that allow them to derive more benefits from working on the author's side; both agents seize the opportunities from working with well-established authors in terms of financial benefits and their prestige. In addition, John Thompson's pragmatic version of Pierre Bourdieu's field theory is applied to the thesis as a theoretical frame. In the context of this theory, the benefits that the two agents derive from working on the author's side are the generated economic, social and symbolic capital. The thesis is divided into 3 chapter, Introduction and Conclusion.