David McCormick

Who

McCormick is one-half of boutique literary agency McCormick & Williams.

Backstory

A former editor at the New Yorker and Texas Monthly, McCormick applied his literary credentials to a second career as an agent, taking a position with ICM in 1998. In 2002, he co-founded the Collins McCormick literary agency with Nina Collins. Just three years later, though, the pair split up, and McCormick formed McCormick & Williams with Amy Williams, taking the entire staff of the office with him, save for Collins and her assistant.

Of note

The new agency represents authors including Cynthia Rowley, Seth Mnookin and Elizabeth Kostova, who received a $2 million advance for her 2006 novel The Historian. A fan of graphic novels, McCormick negotiated the deal for political cartoonist Frank Cammuso's Knights of the Lunch Table and The Misadventures of Salem Hyde. The former is slated for release in summer 2008 via Scholastic and is the first title in Cammuso's four-book deal. McCormick's recently-brokered deals also include a biography of Walter O'Malley—the Dodgers owner who moved the team to LA—by Pulitzer winner Michael D'Antonio, to Geoff Kloske at Penguin/Riverhead; and National Geographic magazine editor Peter Miller's The Smart Swarm: How Ants, Bees, and Birds Teach Us to Cope with a Complex World, to Penguin/Avery.

Drama

McCormick took on authors Nick Flynn and Akhil Sharma when their agent Bill Clegg dropped off the map because of "personal problems." Several months later, the McCormick & Williams crew were chagrined to hear that Flynn and Sharma had reunited with Clegg at his new home, William Morris.

In print

McCormick was one of the editors of The Ultimate Golf Book: A History and a Celebration of the World's Greatest Game in 2002; his co-editor was former New Yorker scribe–and current Times writer-at-large–Charles McGrath, the father of current New Yorker staff writer Ben McGrath.

Personal

McCormick is married to Kathryn Kost. They live in a Park Slope brownstone.