Sterling Lord, Jack Kerouac’s Literary Agent, Dies at 102

Sterling Lord, the literary agent whose six-decade career began when he championed then-unknown Jack Kerouac, died on Saturday at 102, according to his daughter. “He had a good death and died peacefully of old age,” Rebecca Lord told the Associated Press. The “Lord of Publishing,” as he titled his 2013 memoir, was a budding agent in 1952 when Kerouac shuffled into his office with a battered copy of an unpublished manuscript. It took Lord four years to get On the Road published, securing Kerouac, who had been begging his agent to concede defeat, a $1,000 advance. The book has never been out of print, and Lord went on to accumulate celebrated clientele including Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest; Nicholas Pileggi, whose non-fiction book Wiseguy would inspire Martin Scorsese to make Goodfellas; and Stan and Jan Berenstain, whose first Berenstain Bears book heralded a children’s literary empire.