Sterling Lord '42 shares stories of his career and longtime friend Jack Kerouac with Vanity Fair

Coincidental with the release of the On the Road film, Sterling Lord has written a memoir, Lord of Publishing (published this month by Open Road), and if it reveals one wonderfully unabashed thing about him it is his love of writers. "Losing a longtime client," he writes, "can feel like death." Among the renowned authors he represented, apart from Jack Kerouac, are Ken Kesey, Howard Fast, Gloria Naylor, Terry Southern, Dick Francis, and Nicholas Pileggi. Lord, who apparently put them all before anyone else, has been married four times.