Posted on 08/14/2026 10:53:48 AM PDT by Angelino97
Here’s an interesting question: how many white American men born after 1984 have had a literary piece published in The New Yorker? The answer is zero. How did we get here, and who let this happen?
Every literary generation used to produce its Roth, Updike, Bellow, Wolfe, McCarthy, or Franzen. Today’s literary establishment shows no interest in producing young men of comparable prominence—especially if they’re straight and white.
This is not a new or underdiagnosed problem; in fact, it appears to be a point of pride for the new generation of literary critics and publishers alike. Penguin Random House has no problem publishing it’s demographics yearly and celebrating the slow but consistent decline in white editorial staff.
Acclaimed novelist Joyce Carol Oates had no issue tweeting that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.” And, without a hint of irony, followed up that statement with “this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’”
Although she is willing to recognize that young white men may be talented and barred from literary opportunities, she cannot help but equalize the statement with ludicrous notions of “privilege” where there is anything but.
None of this is especially controversial within the industry itself. By 2021, there was not a single white male millennial on the Times’s “Notable Fiction” list; the same was true in 2022, and only one appeared in each of the next two years.
Demographic transformation of American publishing is measured, publicized, and, in many quarters, celebrated. The question is not whether the literary establishment has changed, but whether its new priorities have altered the kind of literature it is capable of producing.
If the aspiring Roth or McCarthy today finds fewer editors willing to take his manuscript seriously (not because of its prose but because of the demographic profile of its author), that represents more than an injustice to individual writers. It represents a narrowing of the imaginative possibilities of American literature itself.
Beyond the disparities in race among novelists and literary agents lies the much more pervasive racial disparity in short-form magazines where fiction writers can build a portfolio. These magazines brazenly cater to just about every favored identity group imaginable.
They offer fee-free submissions for minority groups; they have exclusive windows to segregate who may submit; and they champion these groups as combating historical over-representation from white men. This, of course, can only go on so long before these identity groups, themselves, become the over-represented ones.
The most commonly offered explanation for this obvious discrimination against white men is that publishing is simply “correcting historical imbalances.” An industry that once professed indifference to the identity of the author increasingly treats identity as a meaningful criterion in and of itself.
Literary merit is now expected to coexist with representational goals, institutional diversity targets, and a moral vocabulary inherited from Marxist cultural theory. The result is a publishing culture that increasingly evaluates fiction not as art but rather as an instrument of social justice.
What does this mean for us? What does this mean for the West?
Many conservatives are quick to dismiss fiction and literary pursuits as lowbrow or frivolous. These shortsighted people tell us that stories are just something for children or young adults to read for pleasure and do not have the same impact on our culture that as other pursuits. It is not uncommon for even the most bookish of Republicans to view the whole question with disdain, but that attitude ignores several key truths.
First, novels are among civilization’s most powerful instruments of cultural transmission. Long before a people codifies its values in law, it embodies them in myth, folklore, drama, and fiction. A society’s fiction reveals what it admires, what it fears, what it finds amusing, what it regards as sacred, and what it believes worthy of preservation.
While conservatives buried themselves in historical reports, manifestos, and memoirs, those on the left gleefully captured the hearts and imaginations of the American people. Novels serve as basis for movies and television series; they inspire people to act; they are quoted and cited ad nauseum in debate and discussion.
The right wing has been all too happy to concede this ground to a political class eager to deconstruct and destroy the West.
The right has ceded the literary world under the mistaken assumption that novels are luxuries while politics is reality. In truth, politics follows culture, and culture is transmitted through stories. Before a people votes together, it imagines together. The abolitionist movement had Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Progressivism had The Jungle. Anti-totalitarian liberalism had 1984 and Animal Farm.
The disappearance of young male authors is not just another sign of a decline in literacy, or another case of DEI taken too far; it is the drying up of the fertile ground in America from which all ideas spread.
If conservatives wish to preserve Western civilization, they cannot content themselves with competing in elections while abandoning those institutions that shape imagination. They will need publishers, journals, literary prizes, patrons, critics, and, above all, novelists.
Politics may determine who governs a nation. Stories determine what kind of nation we’ll have.
The New Yorker thinks there should be another Holden Caulfield out there sitting down at a typewritter punching down on mechanical keys.
Hay New Yorker, the 1950s called. They want their young white rebellious male novelist trope back.
> If I were an author, I would present as a black lesbian.
And how do you know that other writers aren’t doing that already?
One word. Pseudonyms.
I know of a lot of writers who are not anything like what the public believes them to be. Fake name, fake bio, fake author’s photo. As one said to me, “Black is the color they’re buying this year.”
[sound of zipper opening]
Oh, it's twue. It's twue. It's twue, it's twue!”
Not one in twenty freepers read the articles to which they post.
Sad.
Well nobody interviews authors anymore that’s true. I blame ‘New Media’. Not that I’m pointing fingers and blaming, I’m just making an observation rather than a complaint.
NYC creeps that hate America.
“Who reads the New Yorker?”
A primarily female audience perhaps. I looked at Amazon’s best seller list and there are plenty of male authors.
Isn’t that how Laz did it?
And that’s tame compared to how he sometimes presents on FR.
Young white males have turned to other publishing channels and are doing quite well there. Smart publishers are noticing.
Take as an example Matt Dinniman. He has written a series of books known as the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. These books, I believe he is up to number 8, do particularly well as audio books, but also sell very well in traditional formats. He has taken a fringe genre and made it mainstream. He started off self-publishing but has been picked up by Ace Books and he has sold the rights to make his works into a TV series being overseen by Seth MacFarlane.
Old school outlets and publishers - like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Simon and Schuster, Penguin, et al - are actually beginning to be perceived by Gen Z readers as marginalizing themselves with their focus on female and LGBTQMOUSE authors. If you are a young straight white male why would you want to be published by a company that caters to an exclusively far left audience?
Good summary.
IF THEY ARE SENIORS IN HIGH SCHOOL & THEY CANNOT READ OR WRITE——HOW WILL THEY BECOME AUTHORS?
CHECK WITH THE TEXAS TEACHER WHO POSTED A VIDEO EARLIER THIS WEEK.
This year, I got a selection of short story collections from my local bookstore. In one of them I read the editor's forward, and it started off with a TDS screed. What on earth was that doing in a collection of mystery stories? Sure enough, the first story had a bad guy who was a gun-loving racist conservative, and another distasteful character who, oh no, watched Fox News. The heroine was a sociology PhD who stuck up for her wimpy husband.
There was no interesting story, the arc was completely predictable, and we knew whodunit after the second paragraph. I was hoping for a surprise twist - but that never happened. Total drivel.
I want my $19 back.
Just because I don’t read the New Yorker doesn’t mean I am uninterested in literature. When I was in high school, I tried to understand their cartoons, but I gave up. There is a vast English speaking world that cares little what a self appointed elite who live in Manhattan thinks about books.
write? they can barely read
I've been mostly reading classics, including genre writers from the 19th to mid 20th century.
Lots of great supernatural horror writers in the public domain, whose works you can get free at Archive.org: Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe. Robert Aickman is still under copyright, but very good. Many others.
If you prefer mysteries, or science fiction, or war, or adventure, again, many classic authors in the public domain. I'm planning to read Beau Geste, Storm Of Steel, Solzhenitsyn's 1916, Camus's The Plague, H.G. Well's The Invisible Man. I read his Time Machine last year. Also read Dickens's A Tale Of Two Cities last year, which had long been on my bucket list.
I also recommend the naturalistic novels of George Gissing, set in the his London of the latter 19th century.
When I started my professional career in the early 1980s, I was working in an office where most of the employees were young men with engineering or physical science degrees. It surprised me to learn that, although most could read proficiently (including scientific literature), few could write more than a single intelligible paragraph.
Unfortunately, it has apparently gotten worse since then. Recent reports suggest that many young Americans graduate from high school with the reading ability of grade school children. And simply put, if they can't read, they are unlikely to possess any writing skills whatsoever...
“My nephew is a published author. Does very well.
He publishes under a female name and just flat lied to his publisher about his ethnicity and origin. His wife talks with the agent.”
Send him my regards
Probably named Jimmy. That’s a rank
My kid graduated from what is considered a decent American High School.
His verbal skills are for shit (vocabulary in terms of lexicon is limited):
—He can’t write cursive.
Cursive works on the brain, memory, and many historic documents are written in this.
—He never read Plato’s Republic.
But we live in a “republic,” maybe why most people don’t know that today, nor what that means?
—He never read Beowulf.
The oldest epic poem in English known.
—He didn’t read Shakespeare.
Tells what the basic types of stories there are: man vs. man, himself or nature.
—He didn’t read Mark Twain.
Probably the most influential US author of all times, even impacting the language itself.
BUT, he was exposed to poetry by a black female poet!
He does know what every letter in LGBTQIA stands for.
It all starts in the schools, and these have become no more than libtard indoctrination centers where kids do not learn the basics.
If they can’t read, they can’t write
What you said.
The “establishment” publishers and gatekeepers in the press that dominate reviews have been largely taken over by the left. This is the “long march through the institutions” strategy that the left has systematically pursued in so many domains. Leftists move into institutions traditionally committed to open discussion and tolerance for a diversity of viewpoints. They establish a foothold. They then begin to relentlessly recruit and hire their own while blackballing everyone else. Eventually they get control and the institution becomes a party line monoculture.
In many fields, including publishing, this should create opportunities to build and grow conservative alternatives. In leftist domains, conservatives are now the counterculture. We should learn to relish the role and cultivate some of the insurrectionary swagger. Let the young people see that the leftists are the corrupt, brain dead status quo and careerist hacks.
When it comes to the novelists, however, the leftist takeover of the universities creates a special problem. A LOT of rising writers support themselves in academia while they work on the next great American novel. Sure: you don’t HAVE to do that; you don’t have to teach. You could be a welder or an accountant and work on the novel in your spare time. But college teaching offers unparalleled free time and flexibility of hours. And if you teach in a literary related field, work on your novel can be professional cv. A research chemist probably can’t use his passion for blending tea or brewing his own beer to meet his professional obligations to the university. But a writer can scribble unfinished works to his heart’s content and check the boxes. And eventually publish some of them in a university supported Journal of Literary Navel Gazing overseen by faculty colleagues engaged in the same scam.
The universities have turned their Departments of Literature into tax supported holding pens for cloning themselves. Conservative writers are probably going to have to actually work for a living to support their writing ambitions.
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