Literary agent who died on January 18th 2026, aged 97. Born around 1928 into a family of German Jews who had left Berlin after Hitler came to power and settled in the Trocadéro section of Paris, France. His father was a record-company executive who died of cancer shortly before Jews in Paris had to start wearing the yellow star. His mother was arrested by the French militia and died in Auschwitz.
At 14, Borchardt fled Paris with his mother and two older sisters after being warned of the Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup, during which French police arrested 13,000 Jews, most of whom would be sent to Auschwitz. He crossed out of Nazi-occupied France with a group of French schoolchildren, making his way to Nice and then Aix-en-Provence, where he attended lycée under the pseudonym "Borchard" (after a pianist and composer whose productivity during the occupation made the name seem safe). His sisters hid in a remote hilltop village.
After the war he tried to reclaim the family apartment in Paris but found it stripped bare, including his beloved book collection. He briefly tried law school, hated it, and at 19 emigrated to New York with his sisters, without connections and speaking schoolboy English.
Borchardt placed two employment-seeking advertisements in the New York Times and received one reply to each, both from the same person: Marion Saunders, who ran a literary agency representing French authors and had recently sold American rights to Albert Camus's "The Stranger" for $350. He began as a filing clerk and manuscript reader.
In 1953 he championed a middle-aged Irishman writing novels and plays in French. Editors dismissed the work ("Pale imitation of Joyce"; "Unreadable"), but Borchardt persisted until Barney Rosset at Grove Press offered $1,000 for "Waiting for Godot", "Molloy" and "Malone Dies". Samuel Beckett won the Nobel prize in literature 16 years later.
He also championed Elie Wiesel, a Romanian-Jewish journalist who had written a memoir of his time in Auschwitz. Fifteen publishers rejected the book; Blanche Knopf, co-founder of one of New York's most illustrious publishing houses, wrote: "He will never find an audience in this country." Borchardt sold the rights to "Night" for $250, conditional on finding a British publisher to share translation costs. Its first print run of 3,000 copies took three years to sell. By 2018 it was selling 3,000 copies a week. Wiesel won the Nobel peace prize in 1986.
In 1967 Borchardt and his wife Anne—whom Philip Roth remembered as "the most beautiful girl in Newark"—started their own agency. He eschewed bestsellers and genre fiction, preferring novelists, critics and historians whose books won highbrow prizes.
He vacationed on Port-Cros, a southern French island, with his wife since the 1950s.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock.