Mr. Lorde’s tennis skills—he played since he was five years old, ranked nationally as a teenager, and led French national champion Marcel Barnard to five sets in 1949—would be a huge asset, helping the Iowa It gave confidence to small towns in the state. what he might otherwise have been missing. It also ended up in favor of nosy agents who might have ditched the sports section of the newspaper. Many of Lorde’s greatest books, including Peter Gent’s ‘North Dallas Forty’, Bill Knack’s ‘Secretariat’ and Pete Axtelm’s ‘The City Game’, came out of that world of sports.
Then there was his perfect moniker. “What was your name before you changed it?” a friend once asked Sterling Lord. When the book he dealt with was published in Portuguese, an unwitting translator gratefully described the author’s dedication as “to the Most High God.”
Sterling Lord was born in Burlington, Iowa on September 3, 1920, the son of Sterling and Ruth Town Whiting Lord. His father, a furniture executive, was also an amateur bookbinder and developed a love of books in his son. Mr. Lorde wasn’t a writer, so it was a passion that he sat in instead. For many years his only book on tennis was Returning Serve Intelligently. (His own tennis serve resembled a knuckleball and was said to be just as hard to hit.) I did.
After graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa with a degree in English, Mr. Lord was drafted into the army and sent to Europe near the end of World War II. When the battle was over, he helped edit the military publication, the Stars and Stripes Weekly. When the Army dropped its publication in 1948, he and his colleagues, first in Frankfurt, Germany, and then in Paris, adopted the stylish dress that Mr. Lord became his signature. When it closed in 1949, he moved to New York.
Over the next few years, he edited or edited several magazines, including True and Cosmopolitan. These experiences convinced him that copyright agents were underserving magazine writers and failing to notice the changes in the post-war literary market. Americans, including millions of former GIs, suddenly became more mobile, less rustic, less concerned with escapist fiction than with understanding the world around them.