| Occupation: | Literary agent |
| Known For: | Founder of The Wylie Agency |
| Nickname: | The Jackal |
Andrew Wylie (born 1947), known as The Jackal, is an American literary agent.
Wylie is the son of Craig Wylie (1908–1976), one-time editor-in-chief at Houghton Mifflin, and Angela (1915–1989), daughter of the landscape architect and artist Robert Ludlow Fowler, Jr, of Oatlands, New York[1] [2] [3] [4] (son of judge Robert Ludlow Fowler, author of many legal texts).[5] [6] [7] [8] His grandfather, Yale-educated lawyer Horace Wylie was a son of the federal judge Andrew Wylie and grandson of Rev. Andrew Wylie, first President of Indiana University. Horace caused a scandal when he and the younger poet and novelist Elinor Hichborn left their respective families to live together.[9]
Wylie grew up in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, from which he was dismissed in 1965; an interview with his university alumni magazine stated that this was for arranging illicit excursions to Boston for fellow students and supplying them, illegally, with alcohol.[10] When he was a teenager, he spent 9 months in Manhattan's Payne Whitney clinic, a psychiatric hospital, for punching a police officer. He attended, and graduated from, Harvard.
In 1969, Wylie married his first wife, Christina, whom he had met in college. They had a son together, Nikolas. They got divorced c.1974. In 1980 he remarried. Larry Clark was his best man. He has two additional children.
In 1972, Wylie published a short collection of poetry, Yellow Flowers. Many of the verses cited in public sources are sexually explicit in nature. In a 2007 interview, fellow agent Ira Silverberg suggested that Wylie has since attempted to acquire the remaining copies of the collection.[11] Wylie himself denied this allegation, describing Yellow Flowers as a "youthful indiscretion".[12]
Wylie founded the literary agency named after himself in New York in 1980 with a $10,000 loan from his mother. He opened a second office in London in 1996. It now represents more than 1,300 clients, approximately 10% of which are literary estates.[13]
Wylie's clients[14] include:
Throughout his career as a literary agent, Wylie has attracted attention for poaching clients from other agents, and has been nicknamed "The Jackal" for his business tactics.[17] He has been criticized by other agents and publishers for harming the culture of the book industry.[13] In 1995 Martin Amis left his agent of 22 years, Pat Kavanagh, for Wylie, who was reported to have secured an advance of £500,000 for Amis's novel The Information.
In July 2010, Wylie launched a new business, Odyssey Editions, to publish e-books. The first twenty titles were launched on 21 July, available exclusively from Amazon.com. Wylie's friendly attitude towards Amazon was short-lived, however; in 2014 he advised: "If you have a choice between the plague and Amazon, pick the plague." He later went on to liken Amazon's tactics to those of the Islamic State.[18]