But the current culture of blockbuster advances really took shape in the 1970s, when “hardcover publishing was becoming research and development for mass-market paperbacks,” said Peter Mayer, who started the trade paperback division at Avon Books and is now publisher of Overlook Press. “It was the hardcover houses who drove the increases by selling paperback rights.”

In 1971, for example, Viking sold paperback rights to “The Day of the Jackal” to Bantam for 36 times the $10,000 hardcover advance it had paid its author, Frederick Forsyth. “Agents realized that they should be the ones holding auctions for their authors and get advances more in line with the anticipated total value of their books,” Georges Borchardt, who brokered the hardcover rights, said in an interview. (Full disclosure: Borchardt, who is my agent, got me $50,000 for my first, nonfiction book.)

In the 1980s and ’90s, big money also started taking hold on the literary end. Agents like Andrew Wylie succeeded in fetching celebrity-size advances for canonical authors — Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie — on the strength of their backlists and sales over time. Before then, the biggest advances went to “disgraced politicians and failed novelists,” Wylie said in an interview. Not that everyone was happy about the littérateur’s shift in fortunes. In 1995, Martin Amis drew the kind of anger reserved these days for derivatives traders when he left his longtime agent for Wylie, who sold Amis’s novel “The Information” for the then outlandish sum of half a million pounds, or nearly $800,000.

Today, such figures are hardly unusual. Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel, published in 2003, is said to have fetched $500,000. More recently, Foer’s brother Joshua reportedly got $1.2 million for a book about memory competitions.

But some say that authors grabbing for the brass ring can risk not just ridicule and envy, but their careers. “It used to be that the first book earned a modest advance, then you would build an audience over time and break even on the third or fourth book,” Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said in an interview. “Now the first book is expected to land a huge advance and huge sales. The media only reports those, not the long path of writers like John Irving, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler and Toni Morrison. The notion of the ‘first book with flaws’ is gone; now we see a novelist selling 9,000 hardcovers and 15,000 paperbacks, and they see themselves as a failure.”

At PublicAffairs, an independent house specializing in current events, advances are as good as capped, said its founder, Peter Osnos. Osnos paid an average advance of $40,000 for PublicAffairs’ four New York Times best sellers in 2008, including Scott McClellan’s “What Happened,” sums greatly augmented by royalty payments when the books hit it big. “If the market says you need to pay $10 million to acquire a title, no one requires a publisher to pay it,” he said in an interview. “You’re not going out of business if you don’t pay that money.”

Today, some publishers are experimenting with low or no advances. In exchange for low-five-figure advances, the boutique press McSweeney’s, founded by Eggers, shares profits with its authors 50-50, as does the new imprint Harper Studio, which offers sub-six-figure advances.

As for Henry Bech, Updike — whose own advances were reputed to be modest — never let him take money up front. But Bech couldn’t entirely avoid the commercialism engulfing publishing. He turned in his final manuscript to his longtime publisher, Vellum Press, which had been sold to a supermarket chain that peddled it to an oil company, which foisted it off on a shale-and-lumber conglomerate. “It was like being a fallen woman in the old days,” Updike wrote. “Once you sold yourself, you were never your own again.”