Early life

Wylie is the son of Craig Wylie, one time editor-in-chief at Houghton Mifflin. He grew up in Sudbury, Massachusetts

Sudbury, Massachusetts

Sudbury is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, population 17,659. The town was incorporated in 1639, with the original boundaries including what is now Wayland. Wayland split from Sudbury in 1780. When first incorporated, it included and parts of Framingham, Marlborough, Stow...

, and attended St. Paul's School

St. Paul's School (Concord, New Hampshire)

St. Paul's School is a highly selective college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire affiliated with the Episcopal Church. The school is one of only six remaining 100% residential boarding schools in the U.S. The New Hampshire campus currently serves 533 students,...

 in Concord, New Hampshire

Concord, New Hampshire

The city of Concord is the capital of the state of New Hampshire in the United States. It is also the county seat of Merrimack County. As of the 2010 census, its population was 42,695....

, 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. This did not prevent his acceptance at Harvard, where he studied Romance Languages & Literatures, graduating magna cum laude in 1969 (class of 1970).

Poet

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. Wylie himself denied this allegation, describing Yellow Flowers as a 'youthful indiscretion'.

Literary agent

Wylie founded his eponymous literary agency in New York in 1980. He opened a second office in London in 1996. It now represents more than 700 clients and literary estates.

Controversies

Throughout his career as a literary agent, Wylie has attracted attention for poaching clients from other agents. Most notably, in 1995 Martin Amis

Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...

 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. The move created a rift between Amis and his long-time friend Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes

Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer, and winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, for his book The Sense of an Ending...

, who was married to Kavanagh.

In July 2010, Wylie launched a new business, Odyssey Editions, to publish ebooks. The first twenty titles were launched on 21 July, available exclusively from Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

.

Clients

• Martin Amis
  Martin Amis
  Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
  
  
• Christine Angot
  Christine Angot
  Christine Angot is a French writer, novelist and playwright.-Life:Born Pierrette, Marie-Clotilde Schwartz in Châteauroux, Indre, she is perhaps best known for her 1999 novel L'Inceste which recounts an incestuous relationship with her father.It is a subject which appears in several of her...
  
  
• Dave Eggers
  Dave Eggers
  Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is known for the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and for his more recent work as a screenwriter. He is also the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia.-Life:Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts,...
  
  
• Al Gore
  Al Gore
  Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. served as the 45th Vice President of the United States , under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election....
  
  
• Elmore Leonard
  Elmore Leonard
  Elmore John Leonard Jr. , better known as Elmore Leonard, is an American novelist and screenwriter. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures.Among his...
  
  
• Salman Rushdie

Estates

• W.H. Auden
• Saul Bellow
  Saul Bellow
  Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
  
  
• Jorge Luis Borges
  Jorge Luis Borges
  Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
  
  
• Norman Mailer
  Norman Mailer
  Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
  
  
• Vladimir Nabokov
  Vladimir Nabokov
  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
  
  
• John Updike
  John Updike
  John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....