Sterling Lord, Premier Literary Agent, Is Dead at 102

For Mr. Lord, who died on Saturday in Manhattan at 102, such steadfastness was standard. For more than 60 years he was one of New York’s most successful and durable literary agents, representing Jimmy Breslin, Art Buchwald, Willie Morris, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Howard Fast, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gordon Parks, Edward M. Kennedy, Robert S. McNamara and the Berenstain Bears, among many others.

Joe McGinniss, for whom Mr. Lord handled the celebrated 1969 study of the marketing of Richard M. Nixon, “The Selling of the President 1968,” said in an interview for this obituary in 2013, a year before he himself died: “Sterling’s career encapsulated the rise and fall of literary nonfiction in post-World War II America. He was the last link to what we can now see not so much as a Golden Age, but as a brief, shining moment when long-form journalism mattered in a way it no longer does and may never again.”

It was for his association with another writer, Jack Kerouac, and Kerouac’s book “On the Road,” that Mr. Lord will most likely be remembered most, though his claim there is disputed.

Mr. Lord was a fledgling Manhattan literary agent in 1952 when, by his account, Kerouac walked timidly into his office, a basement studio on East 36th Street, just off Park Avenue. Though nearly the same age — Kerouac was 29 at the time, Mr. Lord two years older — the two men shared little else; Mr. Lord was an urbane man who favored jackets, foulards and tennis whites, spoke almost inaudibly, and had no apparent vices. Kerouac was a rough-hewed, hard-drinking New Englander who hung around with the Beats.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/04/books/sterling-lord-dead.html