Literary agent Edite Kroll dies at 87

Literary agent Edite Kroll, who represented Shel Silverstein and Sandra Boynton, died at home in Maine on 23 September after a long illness. She was 87.

Publishers Lunch reported her death in an obituary titled 'Obituary: Edite Kroll' on 28 September. It said Kroll had continued agenting work, meaning negotiating publishing deals on behalf of authors, until the week before she died.

Kroll was born in Germany in 1939. She started in publishing in London at Chatto & Windus, a book publisher, before moving to New York in 1965.

In New York, she worked at the publisher Harper & Row alongside editor Charlotte Zolotow. She later opened her own eponymous agency, meaning a literary agency operating under her own name.

Her client list included Silverstein, the writer and illustrator known for children's books, and Boynton, the writer and illustrator of board books for young readers. Kroll was also the literary agent for Moroccan sociologist and writer Fatema Mernissi, as noted in The New York Times. She worked with HarperCollins on Every Thing On It, a posthumous Silverstein poetry collection, according to The Atlantic.

In 2018, Kroll transferred most of her clients and contacts to Victoria Wells at HG Literary, a literary agency based in the United States. Wells continues to work with several names connected to Kroll.

Her biography on the HG Literary website lists the Estate of Shel Silverstein among her responsibilities, meaning the management of an author's rights after death. The same page also lists the Estate of Charlotte Zolotow and the Estate of M.B. Goffstein.

Kroll's career ran from postwar London publishing to present-day New York. She kept working into her late eighties. That continuity is rare in agenting, where client relationships often last decades.