Scott Meredith
American literary agent (founder of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, 1946) who represented Norman Mailer from the fall of 1963 until Meredith's death in 1993 — a thirty-year representation that brackets nearly all of Mailer's high-period book deals. Meredith negotiated the sale of An American Dream to Dial Press in 1963 along with the MGM movie rights, and went on to handle every Mailer book contract through the 1980s and into the early 1990s.
Scott Meredith founded the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in New York in 1946. By the early 1960s the agency was one of the largest literary agencies in New York, with a client list that ranged across literary fiction (Ellery Queen, Norman Mailer), pulp and genre (Philip K. Dick), and serious commercial work. Meredith became Mailer’s literary agent in the fall of 1963, per the JML Days revised RTF and the published Days (p. 354): “Scott Meredith becomes his literary agent in the fall, and successfully negotiates the sale of An American Dream to Dial Press, and the movie rights to MGM.”
The arrival of Meredith marked a structural shift in Mailer’s professional life. Putnam’s had been Mailer’s primary American publisher since The Deer Park in 1955 (and the imprint for Deaths for the Ladies 62.3 and The Presidential Papers 63.37); from late 1963 forward, Meredith’s negotiations carry Mailer’s book contracts — beginning with the An American Dream serial-and-book deal that produced fourteen Esquire installments in 1964 and the Dial Press first edition on 15 March 1965.
Meredith would continue as Mailer’s agent for thirty years, until his death on 11 February 1993. The relationship covered the Dial Press, Little Brown, New American Library, Random House, and Simon & Schuster eras of Mailer’s career.
Stub; to be expanded as Mailer’s book contracts and publishing history are documented in later ingests.
Mailer dedicated The Executioner’s Song (1979) in part to Meredith, his longtime literary agent, and dedicated Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984) to him outright — “To Scott Meredith.”
Related pages
- The Executioner’s Song (79.14) | Tough Guys Don’t Dance (84.17) | 1963 | Dial Press | An American Dream
- Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters) (62.3) | The Presidential Papers (63.37)