Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...novelist selected Sherry for the job after reading his 1971 book on Joseph Conrad, Conrad's Western World. Greene was taken with the scholar's unbiased approach and willingness to travel to the remote and hazardous regions that inspired the author of The Heart of Darkness. And indeed, Sherry makes a fuss about his field investigations for this book: "Risking disease and death as he had done, I went to those places and in most cases found people Greene had met and put into his novels." He tells us that he developed gangrene in South America and got dysentery...
...reportedly promised between $30 million and $40 million for his next four thrillers, to be published by Viking Penguin and New American Library. Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books shelled out $10.1 million for the next five novels from suspense writer Mary Higgins Clark. Warner Books paid Southern historical novelist Alexandra Ripley $4.9 million for the unwritten sequel to Gone With the Wind. (Margaret Mitchell's advance was all of $500 for writing the original...
With these tectonic shifts, the business has abandoned its pretenses of collegiality and moved closer in structure and style to Hollywood, where an oligarchy of half a dozen companies hustles for hits. Says Michael Korda, editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and a best-selling novelist himself, on the subject of big advances: "It's like stars in the movie business. If you want Cher for your movie, by God, you've got to pay Cher...
According to Balzac, "Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation." According to P.J. O'Rourke, "Manners are a way to screw people over without their knowing it." Although 150 years separate the master novelist from the Rolling Stone nihilist, their contempt for social artifice is identical. The difference, of course, is that one of them has a savage comic flair. The other one wrote in French...
...says Robert K. Massie, president of the Authors Guild and a Wylie client. "Andrew isn't going to play along." While some agents swing bigger deals, Wylie has won relatively large advances for the literary writers he represents, including more than $250,000 for two books by the young novelist David Leavitt...