LAST CHAPTER

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

Lord spent decades with his finger on the pulse of culture and repping celebrated authors.

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he titled his 2013 memoir, was a budding agent in 1952 when Kerouac shuffled into his office with a battered copy of an unpublished manuscript.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.