Owen Laster, Literary Agent at William Morris, Dies at 72

Owen Laster, one of the most powerful literary agents of his generation, who ran William Morris’s worldwide literary operations and had a long list of best-selling writers that included James A. Michener and Gore Vidal, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 72. 

Owen Laster, right, with Dominick Dunne.

The cause was cancer, Sally Hudson, a niece, said.
Mr. Laster, in time-honored fashion, started out in the William Morris mailroom fresh from college and spent his entire career at the company, retiring in 2006. 
Initially he worked with writers and directors for film and television, but by the mid-1960s his enthusiasm for books and writers propelled him into the agency’s literary department, where he rose quickly and acquired a roster of highly successful writers. Mr. Laster was an old-fashioned agent with a refined manner. In a business with no shortage of sharp elbows, he seemed to operate by Marquess of Queensberry rules. Nevertheless, he not only adapted but flourished in the era of publishing conglomerates and superstar agents, brokering headline-grabbing deals.

In 1977, in an unusual two-for-one deal, he sold the memoirs of former President Gerald R. Ford and the first lady, Betty Ford, for $1 million to Harper & Row and Reader’s Digest. As the agent for the estate of Margaret Mitchell, he sold two sequels to “Gone With the Wind” for fabulous sums. The first, “Scarlett,” by Alexandra Ripley, went to Warner Books for $4.9 million in 1988. The second, sold to St. Martin’s Press in 1995 for $4.5 million, was published in 2007 as “Rhett Butler’s People,” by Donald McCaig.
The megadeals seemed to emerge from thin air. “He never let on what was going on,” said Joni Evans, an agent and publisher he brought to William Morris in 1994 as a senior vice president. “He’d just say, ‘James needs $4 million for the next book.’ He made very few mistakes, and he had an uncanny sense of what a property was worth.”
Owen Jacob Laster was born on Aug. 30, 1938, in Weehawken, N.J. His parents, immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, ran an embroidery factory. Owen grew up in several northern New Jersey towns along the Hudson River.
After earning a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University in 1960, he served in the Army and went to work at William Morris, encouraged by a friend who knew of his passion for film, theater and books.

Mr. Laster resisted the idea at first. “I had this view of an agent as a wiry, skinny, greasy-haired person with a mustache,” he told The New York Times in 1986.
Within a few months he graduated from the mailroom to the publicity department, where he sent out photos and biographies of the agency’s show-business clients to nightclubs. By 1956 he was an agent, of the nongreasy type.
His career in books began a decade later when Helen M. Strauss brought him into the company’s literary department, which she had created in the 1940s. When she left William Morris two months later, he inherited several of her writers, and in 1973 he was put in charge of the literary department. In 1989 he became head of the agency’s worldwide literary operations.
Mr. Laster’s client list was unusually diverse, divided almost equally between fiction and nonfiction authors and, on the fiction side, between literary writers like Ralph Ellison and Edward Albee and best-selling genre writers like Joy Fielding, Bari Wood and James Crumley. For many years he represented Dominick Dunne, Susan Isaacs and Judy Blume, as well as numerous literary estates, including those of Frank Yerby, Leon Uris and Chaim Potok.
One of his quirkier successes was the novel “... And Ladies of the Club,” which made an unlikely literary star of its author, Helen Hooven Santmyer, an 88-year-old retired librarian from Ohio. When it was published by the Ohio State University Press in 1982, the novel sold only a few hundred copies, but a college classmate of Mr. Laster’s brought it to his attention, and Mr. Laster sold it to Putnam’s. After being republished in 1984, it became a main selection of the Book of the Month Club and a No. 1 best seller.

In its own way, the astonishingly successful career of Mr. Michener was just as anomalous. Against the prevailing literary winds, he remained one of the most dependable writers of best-selling fiction in the United States for decade after decade and, thanks in no small part to Mr. Laster, one of the richest. “It really is amazing how long he kept the Michener flag flying,” Ed Victor, a literary agent in London, said of Mr. Laster, with whom he often traveled to the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany.

Several of Mr. Laster’s agents and assistants went on to establish important careers, notably Robert Gottlieb, who became head of the literary department and executive vice president of William Morris before starting his own company, Trident Media Group, in 2000.
Mr. Laster, who leaves no immediate survivors, came up with a simple explanation for his career in his 1986 interview with The Times. “I like to read,” he said. “I like books, and I like writers.”