verbs - "Were" or "was" in this sentence from a The New York Times article


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.



Is the fragment "a great many of his stories and novels were adapted to ..." 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.




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