Christopher Little, "who as a struggling literary agent took a chance on a scrappy submission about tween-age wizards--even though he once disdained children's fiction as a money-loser--and built it into the most successful literary empire in history on the strength of its lead character, Harry Potter," died January 7, the New York Times reported. He was 79.
"Christopher Little was the first person in the publishing industry to believe in me," Rowling said. "Being taken on by his agency was a huge break for an unknown writer. He represented me throughout the 10 years I published Harry Potter and, in doing so, changed my life."
Little first became an agent in 1979 when Philip Nicholson, a childhood friend, asked him to help sell his first novel, a thriller written under the pen name A.J. Quinnell. Man on Fire ultimately sold 7.5 million copies and was twice adapted for film, most recently in 2004 with Denzel Washington. Little subsequently opened the Christopher Little Literary Agency, "though he maintained that selling manuscripts was just a 'hobby.' It soon became more than that," the Times wrote.
In 1995, Rowling, an unpublished, unemployed single mother in Edinburgh, sent Little the first three chapters of her book "after finding his name in a directory of literary agents. Knowing nothing about the business, she picked him because his name made him sound like a character from a children's book," the Times noted.
Little submitted the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to 12 publishers and received 12 rejections before selling it for £2,500 (about $3,420), "a meager amount, but his genius was in the details: He sold only the rights to publish it in Britain and the Commonwealth, and he asked for high royalties," the Times wrote. Little sold the U.S. rights for just over $100,000 and the film rights for $1.8 million.
In 2011, Rowling split with Little when his in-house lawyer, Neil Blair, left to establish his own agency. Although Little threatened to sue, he backed off after Rowling paid him an undisclosed sum.
Little went on to represent bestselling authors like Darren O'Shaughnessy and Janet Gleeson. In 2012 he merged his agency with Curtis Brown and continued to take on new clients, including Shiromi Pinto, author most recently of the novel Plastic Emotions. "It was because he took a chance with her, that he was able to take a chance on someone like me," Pinto said.