Georges Borchardt, Literary Agent Who Secured English Publication of 'Night', Dies at 97

Georges Borchardt, a New York literary agent who arranged for the English publication of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night after it had been rejected by 14 American publishers and who helped introduce American readers to writers such as Samuel Beckett, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan.

He was 97, his daughter, Valerie Borchardt, confirmed. Mr. Borchardt and the Manhattan agency he and his wife, Anne Borchardt, founded in 1967, Georges Borchardt Inc., represented five Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize winners and authors and estates including Ian McEwan, T.C.

Boyle, Tracy Kidder, Mavis Gallant, Anne Applebaum and the estates of Tennessee Williams and Aldous Huxley. He also championed major French and avant-garde writers in the United States, among them Roland Barthes, Marguerite Duras, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon and Eugene Ionesco.

As a young agent he helped secure an American publisher for Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and he persisted in finding a home for Wiesel’s La Nuit. Hill & Wang bought the manuscript in 1959 for $250; initial sales were about 1,000 copies, but sales rose after the 1961 Eichmann trial and the 1967 Six-Day War, the book became required reading in thousands of schools, received an Oprah endorsement in 2006 and by 2020 had estimated worldwide sales of 14 million.

Key Topics

Culture, Georges Borchardt, Elie Wiesel, Night, Samuel Beckett, Manhattan