http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/books/timothy-seldes-literary-agent-dies-at-88.html

Timothy Seldes, Agent Who Championed Literary Stars, Dies at 88

BRUCE WEBER DEC. 8, 2015

Timothy Seldes, a literary agent who for 40 years owned the venerable agency Russell & Volkening and represented a roster of notable writers, including Anne Tyler, Nadine Gordimer and Annie Dillard, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Washington. He was 88.

The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, the novelist Susan Shreve.

Mr. Seldes (pronounced SELL-dess) came from a family distinguished in literature and theater. His father, Gilbert Seldes, was a prominent commentator and critic on jazz, theater and other cultural subjects; his sister was Marian Seldes, the Tony-winning actress, who died in 2014.

Mr. Seldes’s career as an agent began in 1972, when he bought his agency from its founders, Diarmuid Russell and Henry Volkening, who had been in business since 1940 and whose clients included Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman and George Plimpton.

He sold the agency in 2012 to Lippincott Massie McQuilkin, ending a tenure that gave Mr. Seldes an insider’s view of book publishing as it transformed from a powerful business and a formidable guardian of American high culture to an industry scrambling to compete in an era of electronic media and declining readership, as dependent on novelties as on novels.

As a personality, he was a throwback to a time when the literature business was famously genteel.

“He was a gentle man and a gentleman,” Jim Lehrer, the PBS newsman and novelist, who worked with Mr. Seldes on more than 20 books, said in an email. “Every word he ever spoke to me about anything was done gently.”

And though he had experience as a book editor — he worked at Doubleday for 17 years, rising to managing editor — he took his role as a writer’s representative seriously enough to read his clients’ work carefully and responsively, but not to try to shape books in any way other than to understand the writers’ intentions. As Mr. Lehrer put it, “He believed strongly that his mission was to push to publication the book I had written rather than another one I should or might have written.”

Ms. Tyler, whose novel “Breathing Lessons” won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, added in an email, “He didn’t edit in any way, never suggested changes or different titles, but that’s not to say he was a yes-man; he once stated flat-out that a book I’d just finished should be put away in a drawer, and I trusted his judgment so completely that I followed his advice without question.”

Mr. Seldes was born in Manhattan on Dec. 16, 1926. His father was, among other things, managing editor of the influential magazine The Dial, which during his tenure published Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”; his mother, the former Alice Hall (known as Amanda), was a socialite. An uncle, George Seldes, was an investigative journalist best known for publishing his own progressive newsletter, In Fact.

Tim Seldes attended Phillips Exeter Academy, served in the Navy at the end of World War II and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles. While at Doubleday, he edited, among many other books, science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov and two volumes of memoirs by President Harry S. Truman.

Mr. Seldes’s first wife, Karen, died in 1957. (His family said they were divorced at the time, though a brief report in The New York Times said they were “living apart.”) His second marriage, to the former Aileen Patterson, known as Lee, ended in divorce.

In addition to Ms. Shreve, whom he married in 1987 and who was also his client, he is survived by a son, Gilbert; a daughter, Elisabeth Seldes Annacone; two stepsons, Porter and Caleb; two stepdaughters, Elizabeth and Katharine Shreve; a grandson; and nine step-grandchildren.

In a 2009 audio interview with Narrative magazine, Mr. Seldes lamented what had become of literature as a foundation of the publishing business. Fiction, he said, used to have a real audience. No longer.

“On those occasions when I have to talk to people, I always say imagine the following scenario,” he said. “There’s a young man — I choose a man because most of the book buyers in this country are women anyway, so it’s ‘choose a man’ — he’s walking home to his wife and children, passes a bookstore, goes in, stops at the new-fiction table, looks at five or six titles, reads the flap copy, chooses one he likes, goes and buys it for $30 and walks home with it and says to his family, ‘Well, I think I’ll just read this novel tonight.’ Now, how often in the U.S. of A. does that scenario occur? I’d be surprised if it happens once a day.”

Correction: December 20, 2015

Because of an editing error, an obituary last Sunday about the literary agent Timothy Seldes misstated the date of his death. It was Dec. 5, not Nov. 5.