The fact that the world is now celebrating the arc of Mr. McCarthy’s monumental career is a testament to the novelist’s undeniable talent. But it’s also due to his timely recognition that, without his protector, Mr. Erskine, and the vanished world of publishing that Mr. Erskine represented, he would need to change the way his books were published.
In the 1960s, large corporations began acquiring publishing houses, consolidating the industry into fewer and fewer conglomerates. In the 1970s, inflation increased the price of books even as wages stagnated and consumers had less to spend. Shareholder value became corporate scripture, inducing managerial demands for quarterly growth. For publishing, this meant marketing, publicity and sales departments grew and gained influence. Editors spent more time in meetings and filling out profit-and-loss forms. Literary agents became essential intermediaries, as publishing houses no longer riffled through submissions to find emerging talents. A poorly typed manuscript like Mr. McCarthy’s debut would struggle to make it into, let alone be rescued from, a slush pile.
Random House had a guardian against these forces of change in its chief executive Robert Bernstein, who in the 1970s buffered the publisher from the interference of its corporate parent, RCA. In the 1980s, he did the same when ownership shifted to S.I. Newhouse. But in 1989, Mr. Newhouse replaced him with Alberto Vitale, a businessman who’d spent most of his career at the typewriter company Olivetti and the carmaker Fiat. As recounted in an interview Mr. Vitale gave to Publishing Perspectives, he told the staff members that they “needed to make money.” His new policy, according to the author André Schiffrin, “was that each book should make money on its own and that one title should no longer be allowed to subsidize another.” It was a credo that would have made the long gestation of Mr. McCarthy’s early career impossible.
It did, however, make the next phase of his career possible.
After Mr. Erskine retired, Mr. McCarthy wrote to the agent Lynn Nesbit (who represented Robert Caro, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe, among many others) to seek representation. “I’ve never had an agent before,” Mr. McCarthy wrote, as recounted in The Cut, “but I’m thinking now of getting one, and if you’re interested in talking to me, please call me before noon Rocky Mountain time.” She passed his letter along to an ambitious protégée, Amanda “Binky” Urban — who, as it happened, had read “Suttree” and considered it “an amazing book.”
Ms. Urban took Mr. McCarthy on and engineered a move from Random House to Knopf, where a new editor in chief, Sonny Mehta, had recently replaced the legendary Robert Gottlieb (who also died last week). The New York Times called Mr. Mehta’s arrival at Knopf “tortuous” as he struggled to learn the house’s “mysterious traditions.” He needed a big win, and when Ms. Urban pitched him on publishing Mr. McCarthy, an esteemed MacArthur recipient who had not yet had a commercial hit, he replied, “I’d love that.” She called the head of Random House to approve the move and, as she told The Cut, he replied, “I can’t believe I’m picking up the phone to talk about an author who’s never sold more than 2,500 copies.”