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NEW YORK (AP) -- Georges Borchardt, a literary agent of cosmopolitan taste and style who found U.S. publishers for future Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel and Samuel Beckett and represented dozens of other prize-winning authors, from Ian McEwan to Tracy Kidder, has died at age 97.
Georges Borchardt Inc., the agency he founded in 1967, said he died Sunday in Manhattan, "peacefully at home surrounded by family, including his beloved wife and business partner of over 60 years, Anne Borchardt." His wife told The Associated Press he died in his sleep, and cited no cause beyond his age.
Few agents were as successful and as beloved as Borchardt, once praised by author T.C. Boyle as "the most wonderful man who ever lived on this earth." Borchardt helped introduce English-language readers to Eugene Ionesco, Marguerite Duras and other leading French writers and was an early enthusiast for two French-language works that became international classics -- Wiesel's "Night" and Beckett's "Waiting for Godot."
A champion of texts old and new, he managed the literary estates of Beckett, Aldous Huxley and Tennessee Williams. When Princeton University scholar Robert Fagles was struggling to get his translation of Homer's "The Iliad" released, Borchardt stepped in and negotiated a deal with Viking. Fagles went on to complete acclaimed and bestselling editions of "The Iliad," "The Odyssey" and "The Aeneid."
Other clients at the agency, which he ran with his wife and his daughter, Valerie, included Claire Messud, poets John Ashbery and Robert Bly, feminist Kate Millett and the critic-novelist Stanley Crouch.
Borchardt was lucky to survive childhood. A native of Berlin who moved to Paris as a boy, Borchardt lost his father to cancer at 11 and lost his mother when she and other Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
He emigrated to the U.S. in 1947 and though unable to speak English, taught French at New York University and found work at the Marion Saunders literary agency after placing an advertisement in The New York Times.
In the late 1950s, Borchardt tried to interest publishers in a brief, novelistic memoir released in France about a boy's horrifying coming-of-age in a concentration camp -- Wiesel's "Night." Borchardt initially faced rejection because the industry was reluctant to take on Holocaust stories, despite the success of "The Diary of Anne Frank," he told The New York Times in 2008.
Hill and Wang, now an imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, signed the book for $250, "payable in two installments and on condition that I find a British partner to share the translation cost," Borchardt recalled. "Night" was published in English in 1960, sold millions of copies and launched Wiesel's career as author, activist and humanitarian.