Posted on Mar 1, 1994

Mary Jack Wald and her son Lem Lloyd. The presence of Lem and his sister, Danis, made Mary Jack a most unusual student at Union in the '60s.

Americans love their myths just look at how long Abner Doubleday's invention of baseball in rural Cooperstown has persisted.

But Mary Jack Wald '67 wants to let the truth out about one myth-women were enrolled at Union long before 1971, generally considered the start of coeducation.

Wald arrived on campus in the mid-1960s with her first husband, who was stationed by the ROTC to teach military history. Since the College allowed faculty spouses to enroll as full-time students, Wald spent four years as the only woman in her classes before she graduated and the Air Force moved her husband to Germany.

“I got married when L was eighteen,” Wald recalls, “and so L used to attend college wherever my husband was stationed. First L went to Boston University, then to the University of Tampa, and finally Union. The problem was, each college threw out the credit I'd earned at my previous schools.” Today, as president of her own literary agency, Mary Jack Wald Literary Associates,
this Union alumna puts her degree in English to good use. In fact, she has been using her English education for more than a quarter century, having worked as an English teacher, a book product manager in charge of mail order distribution and catalog copywriting, and a managing editor at Western Publishing.

After Western scaled back its operations in 1984 and Wald found herself out of job, she began thinking about becoming a literary agent. Her husband, Alvin Wald, a professor in the Anesthesiology Department at Columbia University, lent support.

In her first year Wald followed the formula of all aspiring literary agents: go to the American Booksellers Association convention and try to get a small hardcover publisher to retain her as a freelance subsidiary rights director who would sell the publisher's reprint and film rights. While she was at the convention, she used her Union background in an unexpected fashion.

“I recognized Paul Kurtz, who had been my logic professor before he became the publisher of Prometheus Books. So L reintroduced myself, gave him my business card, and offered my hard-working services. He responded by pulling out two pocketfuls of agents' business cards, promptly threw them all in the garbage can, and told me L had the job.”

Working with such prominent Prometheus authors as Isaac Asimov and Martin Gardiner gave Wald the foundation to build her reputation. Today, Wald's eclectic client fist includes Winifred Milius Lube, an author and artist whose Metamorphosis of Baubo, consisting of both original
drawings and text representing the historical embodiments of women's sexual energy, will be published by the Vanderbilt University Press; the literary fiction writers Eileen Pollack, whose latest story collection Rabbi in the Attic was reviewed prominently last winter by the New York Times Book Review, and Patricia MacInnes, author of The View From KWAJ, a collection of related stories set in the Bikini Islands during the nuclear tests there in the 1940s; Star Trek and horror writer John Peel; and Baxter Black, known nationwide as the “Cowboy Poet.”

Recently, Wald tracked down the essayist and photographer Robert Crum, whose work she had read in nature and science magazines. Working with Wald, Crum has created a children's book, Eagle Drum: The Story of a Native American Boy Learning to Dance.

“I like to try to show people their potential,” says Wald.

Finding new avenues for writers and artists has become essential in today's shrinking publishing market. With fewer publishing houses, disappearing imprints, and smaller lists, it has become harder for writers and agents to sell their work, especially literary fiction. As a result, Wald says, university presses are going to have to take up the slack for the larger corporate pubfishing companies that no longer seem interested in developing a writer.

Given the state of the publishing world in the nineties, Wald is working even harder to cultivate new projects and develop the careers of her clients. There's certainly reason to believe her business will continue to thrive, though. After all, when you've played a part in overturning a myth, the publishing world should feel like just another ordinary challenge.