It Books

IT agent SUSAN GOLOMB

AGE 42 WHY HER? She sold Glen David Gold's first novel, Carter Beats the Devil, for $687,500 after eight publishers expressed interest. Then Tom Cruise bought the film rights. She saw one author, Gwyn Hyman Rubio (Icy Sparks), welcomed into Oprah's Book Club, while another earned himself a stony dismissal, then went on to win the National Book Award: In his acceptance speech, Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections) thanked "the smartest and toughest agent in New York" who hangs her hat at her eponymous agency. CAREER HIGH "When Jonathan was No. 1 on the USA Today list, which combines hardcover, paperback, fiction, and nonfiction. A literary novel that is outselling every book in America is a great moment for anyone in publishing." ON THE OPRAH INCIDENT "It was just such a shame--she's great for books and he wrote a great book. It was a situation where he was right and she was right, or he was wrong and she was wrong." DREAM COLLABORATOR "Working with Thomas Friedman to write a book that saves the Middle East." HERO "Diana Rigg in The Avengers." WORST ADVICE "Don't go into publishing--it doesn't pay." NEXT Selling a creative science book that touches on spirituality.

IT blockbuster debut STEPHEN CARTER

AGE 47 WHY HIM? The Yale law professor, who served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1980, has seven scholarly books under his illustrious belt. Now Knopf has ponied up $4 million to publish his first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, a family drama about race, passion, and political intrigue, with Warner Bros. snapping up the movie rights. Justice is served. CLOSEST BRUSH WITH CAREER IMMOLATION "When I was a freshman at Stanford I started out as a physics major, but college physics was too hard for me. By the end of the year I was not going to class and playing poker all night. I came within a hair's breadth of being kicked out of school." BEST ADVICE "A professor once said to me that 'no piece of writing is ever finished. You can always make it better. The discipline is to make yourself stop.'" WORST ADVICE "'Why would you want to write about that?'" CREATIVE CRUTCH Online chess. HERO A neighbor in 1966. "When I was about to start seventh grade, my family moved into Cleveland Park, an all-white neighborhood in Washington, D.C. We were the only black family for miles. Sara Kestenbaum was the person who came over and said hello and brought us sandwiches when everyone else was ignoring us." NEXT A 15-city Park tour before fall semester.

IT lit comeback W.C. HEINZ

AGE 87 WHY HIM? As Da Capo Press gathers and reissues his seminal sportswriting (What a Time It Was), his evocative dispatches from World War II (When We Were One), and his knock-you-flat 1958 boxing novel The Professional, new readers are discovering what was revealed to fan Elmore Leonard back in the '50s: Every W.C. Heinz sentence is as clear and cold as an ice cube. CREATIVE CRUTCH "My father got me a 1932 Remington portable typewriter, which I still use. I took it to the war with me. It was on the battleship Nevada at D-Day. I carried it on the road with the Dodgers and the Yankees and the Giants and the football teams. I've had it repaired a number of times and it still works." BOOK THAT CHANGED HIS LIFE In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway's 1925 collection of short stories and sketches. CAREER HIGHOne snowy winter day after The Professional came out, Heinz got a call at home from his publisher. Hemingway had sent a cable from Cuba. It said: "The Professional is the only good novel about a fighter I've ever read and an excellent first novel in its own right." Heinz and his wife, Betty, poured two glasses of bourbon on the rocks. "I lit the fire," he says, "and we sat down, and she said, 'You know, this must be the greatest day of your life.'" EARNED WISDOM "I've always said that I'm not proud of myself, but I'm proud of my work. That's what any professional should remember."