Meet the Literary Agent Who Invented the Book Auction

In 1952, literary agent Scott Meredith did the unthinkable: he sent the same manuscript to ten publishers at the same time, and single-handedly invented the book auction. At least, that’s how Meredith told it, and how his obituaries eventually reported it. The book industry thrives on lore, and Meredith was known to have a flexible relationship with the truth.

Not a week goes by without news of a high-profile auction breaking in Publishers Weekly, or with the number of bidders understatedly reported in a deal announcement on Publishers Marketplace. The auction has become a symbol a writer’s promise, of a publisher’s eagerness, of an agent’s ferocity. A buzzy auction sets the tone for a book, amping up expectations for success. It is publishing at its most capitalistic: high-risk, in hopes of high reward.

The problem with Meredith’s story of the first book auction is that it’s probably not true—at least, not strictly speaking. But a few facts emerge from the otherwise apocryphal account: the book auction wasn’t commonplace until the middle of the 1960s, and Meredith was an early adopter of the strategy. The auction initially caused quite a stir, upsetting tried and true gentlemanly practice. But it’s more likely that the auction took place in 1964, when Meredith sold a debut novel by a 24-year-old named Bruce Douglas Reeves— a novel for which Meredith and Reeves’s publisher, New American Library, clearly had high expectations that were ultimately unfulfilled.

In reality, Scott Meredith never read or responded to a single manuscript, despite his name on the letterhead and signature on the reader’s report.

Scott Meredith wanted to be a writer. Born Arthur Scott Feldman in 1923, he spent his boyhood trying his luck with the popular magazines that boomed in the 1930s. As he would tell it later, at the age of 12, he began submitting three short stories per week, and remained tenacious in the face of near-constant rejection. By the time he turned 20, he claimed, he had sold 400 stories “both to the pulps and to slick magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s.” (I could find no record of these.) After serving in World War II, Meredith continued to write and publish his stories, but the life of a writer didn’t suit him. With his brother, Sidney, he founded the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in 1946.

From his earliest days as an agent, Meredith proudly flouted industry convention while inflating his own reputation and padding his bank account. To build his client list, Meredith sent employees to sneak into publishing houses, where they would offer a bribe of 10 cents to the mailroom workers for each return address they clipped from envelopes in the overflowing slush piles. To each of these aspiring writers, Meredith sent a brochure advertising his services. These aspiring writers could submit their manuscript to the Scott Meredith Literary Agency—for a fee. For the low price of $10-a-novel in 1946, Scott Meredith would reply with his personalized assessment of the work’s promise. Some lucky writers would be invited to continue to correspond with Meredith to further develop their manuscript, paying for each revision in the hopes of signing with the great agent eventually.

In reality, Scott Meredith never read or responded to a single manuscript, despite his name on the letterhead and signature on the reader’s report. Instead, he employed an army of “fee men”—readers straight out of college, most of whom had no writing or publishing experience, to read and respond, posing as the agent himself. At the agency’s height, 8 fee men were employed for 35 manuscripts a week. Meredith amassed for himself the largest slush pile in the business, and a small fortune. Though it raked in profit, the reading fee scheme was never very successful at surfacing promising clients. He received— and rejected— manuscripts from Stephen King and Raymond Carver.

Shady dealings notwithstanding, Meredith eventually became a significant agent within the science fiction community, representing genre-defining figures like Arthur C. Clarke (who wrote the introduction to Meredith’s book, Writing to Sell), Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and (more science, less fiction) Carl Sagan. His most significant client by any measure was Norman Mailer. Despite his notable clients, Meredith was never able to escape the stench of his pay-per-critique scheme: the practice of charging a reader’s fee was as unsavory then as it is now, separating the legitimate agents from the con men. Meredith was both.

In 1964, an opportunity presented itself in the SMLA slush pile: a short story by Bruce Douglas Reeves, a 24-year-old, San Francisco native. The fee men were enthusiastic about this first novel from an unknown writer, titled “Where’s the Action?” A young man in the thrall of Kerouac and the Beats, Reeves produced a novel about restless young San Franciscans, grey flannel suited office workers by day and drug-addled Bohemians by night, jumping in and out of beds and bathhouses. (There is also an amateur mime troupe, naturally.) Meredith sensed an opportunity: he could sell this book. This suited Reeves, who, like many of his characters, was broke.

Meredith’s sense of the shifting balance of power in publishing had been keen, and accurate.

In the early 1960s, publishing played by the “old, hard-and-fast” rule that under no circumstances may a manuscript be submitted to more than one publisher at a time.” According to custom, Meredith should make a ranked-choice list of editors and send the manuscript to one at a time, with a courier and his compliments. The publisher would read, and either offer a standard advance or return the manuscript with their regrets. And down the list they would go, “in leisurely sequence,” a lengthy and demoralizing process that often primed the writer to accept a low-ball offer. But Reeves was broke and needed money fast.

Meredith decided to dictate the terms of the sale. After all, he controlled the supply chain. Without the quality writers he was vetting, training, and pitching, publishers would have nothing to sell. Instead of making the rounds, Meredith had multiple copies printed and sent them out to several publishers at once. This, in itself, was a show of strength— to type 10 to 20 copies of a manuscript and to hire 10 to 20 couriers to hand deliver it took money, but thanks to his slush pile fund, his agency had cash to spare. Sure, it would be seen as “unethical, or at the very least ungentlemanly,” but Meredith had never been one to stand on ceremony.

Nineteen manuscripts were sent out, and soon, the offers began to come in. In the end, they received fourteen offers for “Where’s the Action?” and accepted an offer of $13,500 from New American Library. Within days, the film rights were optioned by Warner’s, for over $100,000, with Natalie Wood attached. (It was unusual for books to be optioned before publication in the early 1960s.) Jack Warner didn’t much like the title, and requested it be changed to The Night Action; Reeves obliged.

Meredith’s sense of the shifting balance of power in publishing had been keen, and accurate. As far-flung international media corporations acquired once-independent publishing houses in the 1960s, agents began to occupy a newly significant position in the field. With specialized knowledge and a keen eye for talent, the agent could both advocate on behalf of authors and scout talent for the ever-busier editor, becoming a useful gatekeeper for author and editor alike. Ever the scammer, Meredith seemed to sense this power shift, this weakness in the system. Like his fee scheme, the auction was another attempt to exploit the agent’s centrality for personal gain. But unlike the fee scheme, the auction caught on.

What began as a matter of necessity, a desperate ploy to get a writer paid quickly, soon became Meredith’s standard operating procedure. “When Scott discovered it was a very good idea and nobody killed him for doing it, he made it part of the regular practice,” remembered his colleague Jack Scovill in Meredith’s obituary (which erroneously dated the auction to 1952). Soon, the practice of simultaneous submissions became widely accepted, and the book auction was born. The auction morphed into various forms, replete with its own strategies and schools of thought around best bids and round robins. The book auction, and the invisible rearrangements in power that made the auction possible, heralded a new era in American publishing.

Early literary agents had worked equally for publisher and author, but the auction marked a significant rearrangement of power. No longer a neutral intermediary with divided allegiances, agents established themselves as the author’s most significant and powerful advocate, over and against publishers in a newly adversarial relationship. And, with the auction, a new generation of agents had arrived, ushering in a new generation of writers—Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Leroi Jones (as Amiri Baraka was then called), Norman Mailer, Flannery O’Connor, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon— and commissioning a new chapter in the American literary canon.

Tap into desire—or, better yet, anxiety—and rationality goes out the window.

“It takes a strong book, of course, to turn old methods topsy-turvy,” wrote Paul Nathan of the auction in Publishers Weekly. Does it? Did the auction arise out of the dogged pursuit of an undeniable, generation-defining literary talent? Or was it simply another scam in a long-line of unethical dealings?

The Night Action may have generated a great deal of excitement among the Meredith fee men, and may have produced a good deal of competition among publishers, but the book itself was poorly reviewed when it was released in 1966. “Very Little Action Found in Night,” proclaimed the Los Angeles Times, describing Reeves’ attempt at hard-scrabble Beat living as “moody, adolescent and sentimental.” Kirkus described the novel as filled with “caricatures out here on the [dance] floor and after a while all those swirling lights and that music can give you a headache.” Publishers Weekly called it “garish, awkwardly written.” The Night Action was printed in hardcover in the US 1966, and then again as a paperback a year later, but has since fallen out of print, and out of memory. The much-vaunted film was never made.

We can’t know what motivated Meredith, or whether he was actually the first to try his luck with simultaneous submissions. But Meredith had undoubtedly learned something else from running petty scams: desire trumps reason and fuels competition. Tap into desire—or, better yet, anxiety—and rationality goes out the window. Publishers will keep bidding, for the sole purpose of staying in the game. For showing that they are the sort of player capable of staying in the game. To win the game. Meredith could play them against one another for the benefit of his client.

While interviewing literary agents for my book, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, I heard a curious phrase repeated: Auction Fever. The term comes from Behavioral Psychology and Economics, attributed to Professor Gillian Ku. Auction Fever is “the emotionally charged and frantic behavior of auction participants,” in which the auction—the act of bidding and competing over a book—produces an irresistible momentum. The auction takes on a life of its own, as bidders lose the capacity to make rational decisions in their desire to win. This is why, Professor Gu and her colleagues argue, Auction Fever often results in over-bidding. When Auction Fever takes hold, the endgame shifts: what began as a competition over a book instead becomes a contest between rivals, a show of respective might. The book is no longer the point; winning is the point.

In publishing, auctions are reported on breathlessly; they are the subject of gossip and speculation and sour grapes. In part, this is because an auction has been taken to symbolize a publisher’s commitment to a writer and a book. If the auction was so hotly competitive, the thinking goes, the book must be outrageously good or the writer enormously promising. So promising, in fact, that several publishers competed over them. Surely, the film options and large print runs and book clubs and publicity campaigns will follow! Nothing primes expectations in the industry like a buzzy auction.

But spectators, too, have fallen prey to Auction Fever, directing our attention to the process rather than the book. Auction Fever tells us that the competition is less about the writer or the book, than it is about a publisher’s reputation—about jockeying for power and position and prestige. The auction isn’t a competition over a book; it’s a competition between publishers. Surely, this is what Meredith sensed when he demanded that publishers compete for the privilege of publishing his author. And as with The Night Action, so too with all auctions that have taken place in its legacy: the book’s quality and the author’s potential are immaterial.

Whatever the publisher’s intentions, auction fever can lead to what economists call the “winner’s curse.” Having gotten carried away by the auction’s momentum, a bidder realizes that they have overpaid and experiences feelings of intense bitterness and regret. The sweet smell of success turns sour. Though the regret that accompanies the winner’s curse should be directed at a process that got carried away, many a writer has found herself the object of a publisher’s disappointment when she inevitably fails to earn out her auction-inflated advance, and suffered the consequences.

Bruce Douglas Reeves did not become the “important new voice in American fiction” that Meredith sold to New American Library, as promised on the book’s dust jacket. For years, Meredith proudly proclaimed himself the inventor the book auction in his agency’s mailers, and his obituaries repeated this “fact” upon his death, but no one— not even Meredith himself, while he was living— could remember the book that was sold. It’s fitting, I think, that the middling book at the center of the (perhaps) first book auction would fall into obscurity. The Night Action was never the point. No book ever is.

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From Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction. Used with the permission of the publisher, Princeton University Press. Copyright © 2026 by Laura B. McGrath