Georges Borchardt is a literary agent with the Georges Borchardt Literary Agency. Georges is a well-respected literary agent in America; he has represented figures ranging from General Charles de Gaulle to Jane Fonda. Borchardt’s first job in New York was as an assistant in a literary agency specializing in foreign writers. In 1959, it was Borchardt who secured an American publisher for Elie Wiesel’s Night, following rejection after rejection by publishers who labeled the memoir of Wiesel’s internment in concentration camps too morbid for American readers. Night has sold more than six million copies in the United States alone.
Borchardt is responsible for the American publication of the first works by Samuel Beckett. He also introduced to American readers major works by Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Marguerite Duras, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Eugne Ionesco, Jacques Lacan, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Laurent de Brunhoff and Jean-Paul Sartre. Borchardt has lectured widely on publishing. He has served on the board of International PEN and as president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR). In 1967, Borchardt branched out on his own, establishing his New York-based literary agency, Georges Borchardt, Inc., with the assistance of his wife, Anne Bolton Borchardt. Their daughter, Valerie Borchardt, joined the agency in 1999.
The Borchardt agency represents many important authors, including Elie Wiesel, Ian McEwan, Jerome Charyn, Robert Coover, and T. C. Boyle, who once described Borchardt as “the most wonderful man who ever lived on this earth.” The agency also handles the literary legacy of the estates of Tennessee Williams, Hannah Arendt, John Gardner, Stanley Elkin and Aldous Huxley. Among the agency’s more than 200 authors are eight Pulitzer Prize and two Nobel Prize winners.