Agent Ralph Vicinanza, founder of his eponymous literary agency, died 26 September 2010, of a cerebral aneurysm. He was 60 years old, and a native of New York City.
After graduating from the City College of New York, Vicinanza got his agenting start at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, before founding his own in 1978.
His AP obituary notes that “early on took a special interest in what he considered an undervalued field—international rights, working on overseas deals for Stephen King, Carl Sagan, and Philip K. Dick.
King credits Vicinanza with “the idea for serializing The Green Mile, his 1996 novel about a prison supervisor and death row inmate during the Great Depression. In the book’s introduction, King wrote that he was having a difficult time because he had other projects going on and knew little about the story’s setting. King knew he needed to do research but worried that research ‘might kill the fragile sense of wonder’ he had developed. So the author ‘pressed on, stacking words and hoping for a kindling, an epiphany, any sort of garden-variety miracle.’
“The miracle came in a fax from Ralph Vicinanza, my foreign rights agent, who had been talking with a British publisher about the serial-novel form Charles Dickens had employed a century ago,” King wrote. “Ralph asked—in the dismissive way of one who doesn’t expect the idea to come to anything—if I might be interested in trying my hand at the form. Man, I leaped at it.”
Vicinanza also represented Joe Haldeman, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Norman Mailer, George R.R. Martin, Terry Pratchett, Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Silverberg, and (after his death) Isaac Asimov’s estate.
He is survived by his mother, Louise Manganiello; his sister, Louise Billie; and his partner, Terrance Rooney.