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I was interested in the following sentence which appeared in an article titled “Hemingway's Prize-Winning Works Reflected Preoccupation With Life and Death" in The New York Times, ON THIS DAY, (July 3, 1961).

Mr. Hemingway earned millions of dollars from his work; for one thing, a great many of his stories and novels were adapted to the screen and television.

Can someone clarify if the fragment "a great many of his stories and novels were adapted to ..." is ungrammatical, as I think it is?

I would reword "were" with "was", but I'm not sure on this correction because I'm not able to precisely identify the subject[s?] of the verb, and if I think that the subject is "a great many" the problem becomes entirely incomprehensible (to me), at all.

(Apologize in advanced if the question is not good for this site, but NYT confused me. Thank you.)

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The subject of the verb is "stories and novels", therefore the use of the verb form were is grammatical. A great many is a modifier. – Irene Jun 5 '12 at 20:55
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were is proper here which could be construed as "to be". – 0A0D Jun 5 '12 at 20:56
Why would you think "many of something" could ever not take a plural? Were you tricked by the "a great many", figuring that "a" most somehow trigger a singular subject? It doesn't. – tchrist Jun 5 '12 at 20:59
@tchrist - In Oxford Dictionary of English I read that the plural form of many as noun is "the many" ("many n. as plural n. the many") – Xavier Vidal Hernández Jun 5 '12 at 21:04
I have no idea what that means. “A great many people are correct. A great deal of people are early.” You cannot use *is there. – tchrist Jun 5 '12 at 21:05
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In the phrase a great many of his stories and novels, a great many of is merely a premodifying element. The head words are the plural his stories and novels, and it is they that determine the subsequent plural agreement in the verb.

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