Timothy Seldes

Timothy Seldes, Agent Who Championed Literary Stars, Dies at 88
~• from: New York Times

Timothy Seldes, a literary agent who for 40 years owned the venerable agency Russell & Volkening and represented a roster of notable writers, including Anne Tyler, Nadine Gordimer and Annie Dillard, died on Dec. 5 (2015) at his home in Washington. He was 88.

The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, the novelist Susan Shreve.

Mr. Seldes (pronounced SELL-dess) came from a family distinguished in literature and theater. His father, Gilbert Seldes, was a prominent commentator and critic on jazz, theater and other cultural subjects; his sister was Marian Seldes, the Tony-winning actress, who died in 2014.

{ ~• ed note: He also represented his uncle, author George Seldes. }

Mr. Seldes’s career as an agent began in 1972, when he bought his agency from its founders, Diarmuid Russell and Henry Volkening, who had been in business since 1940 and whose clients included Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman and George Plimpton.

He sold the agency in 2012 to Lippincott Massie McQuilkin, ending a tenure that gave Mr. Seldes an insider’s view of book publishing as it transformed from a powerful business and a formidable guardian of American high culture to an industry scrambling to compete in an era of electronic media and declining readership, as dependent on novelties as on novels.

As a personality, he was a throwback to a time when the literature business was famously genteel.

“He was a gentle man and a gentleman,” Jim Lehrer, the PBS newsman and novelist, who worked with Mr. Seldes on more than 20 books, said in an email. “Every word he ever spoke to me about anything was done gently.”

And though he had experience as a book editor — he worked at Doubleday for 17 years, rising to managing editor — he took his role as a writer’s representative seriously enough to read his clients’ work carefully and responsively, but not to try to shape books in any way other than to understand the writers’ intentions. As Mr. Lehrer put it, “He believed strongly that his mission was to push to publication the book I had written rather than another one I should or might have written.”

genealogy

In addition to Ms. Shreve, whom he married in 1987 and who was also his client, he is survived by a son, Gilbert; a daughter, Elisabeth Seldes Annacone; two stepsons, Porter and Caleb; two stepdaughters, Elizabeth and Katharine Shreve; a grandson; and nine step-grandchildren.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4265119