Have you heard the news? My people, the White Male Writers, are vanishing. It’s a terrible situation. The other day, I was walking down Dauphine Street in New Orleans when I saw a literary young man simply go
poof! and disappear in a wisp of smoke, leaving only a crumpled suit and a notebook full of unpublished short stories behind. It’s happening more and more. The culprit, of course, is the unchecked spread of Woke—and if things go on like this, we White Male Writers will soon have gone the way of the giant ground sloth. In fact, I may vanish myself any day now. Why isn’t the United Nations or the Pulitzer committee or somebody looking into this?
I’m being facetious, of course, but only because sarcasm is my instinctive response to reading something whiny and insufferable. In
Compact magazine—which ought to be called
Contrarian, because they’ll publish any old guff for clicks—Jacob Savage has just written an essay on “The Vanishing White Male Writer.” Sputtering indignantly as he goes, Savage contends that there just aren’t as
many of us Exciting Whites in literature as there used to be:
By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the [New York Times] “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.
Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down.
Savage doesn’t actually use the words “wokeness” or “DEI” to describe the state of publishing today, but that’s what he’s getting at. The thrust of his argument is that “diversity preferences,” “the mockery of male literary ambition,” and an “insular, female-dominated publishing world” have combined to create the pernicious white-dude deficit he describes. As a result of all this, he claims, “white male millennials are still unable to speak directly to their own condition,” and literary fiction about “middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience” is all but impossible to publish. (Notice that
working-class experience isn’t part of his equation.)
Altogether, Savage’s prolonged whinge reads like the work of a men’s rights activist from Twitter who happened to find a thesaurus. But he’s not the only person who thinks this way. In the
American Spectator, writer Lou Aguilar concurs with him, denouncing a “cold war against male Caucasian fiction authors waged by the left-dominated publishing industry” and saying that Savage has provided “irrefutable proof of this outrage.” (If nothing else, I believe he’s outraged; you can practically hear him fuming through the screen.) Even Joyce Carol Oates has played into this narrative, saying in 2022 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.” But when you look a little closer, it becomes clear that Savage has not provided “irrefutable proof” of anything, and that Oates’ anecdote about her friend doesn’t tell us much about any wider pattern. The “Vanishing White Male Writer” makes an attention-grabbing headline, but it’s a lazy, self-absorbed, and simplistic argument, and it only serves to obscure the very real threats to literature in the world today—of which a sudden lack of whiteness or maleness is not one.
In the first place, the White Male Writers haven’t really vanished at all. In order to claim they have, Savage has to make his definitions of both “literary fiction” and a “white male writer” far narrower than the obvious meanings of those terms. Disparaging a series of perfectly good literary forms, he makes clear that he is not interested in white men who write “genre.” (There goes half the bestseller list! And under this definition, even Cormac McCarthy wouldn’t be considered “literary,” since he used elements of sci-fi, horror, and Western fiction in most of his work.) Similarly, Savage doesn’t care for historical fiction (“utterly terrible period pieces”) or autofiction (“suffocatingly tight.”) Instead, what he wants to see are white men writing “the kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo,” otherwise known as the “Big Splashy Everything Novel.” He also specifies that when he says “white male writer,” he really means a “straight white American millennial man,” meaning one “under the age of 43,” who writes such books and expresses “middle-to-upper-middle-class” concerns.
Already, you might be starting to see the problem with Savage’s case. Like many peddlers of clickbait, he doesn’t actually make the provocative claim that his title does (that “white male writers” as a whole are “vanishing.”) Instead, he claims that a
very specific kind of white male writer (young, American, heterosexual, bourgeois) who writes a
very specific kind of book (novels that are not set in the past, or part of a “genre,” or “autofiction”) is getting somewhat less attention from a
very specific set of listmakers (the NYT, The Atlantic). Using the same rhetorical tactic, you could write a headline about how “Black Female Writers” are “vanishing,” then clarify in the article itself that you mean working-class African American lesbians between the ages of 50 and 75 who write metrical poetry (but not sonnets). Savage’s chosen terms tell us almost nothing about the publishing industry as a whole—where, in 2021, an internal audit at Penguin Random House found that titles “skew heavily white,” and a statistical analysis of more than 7,000 novels from the bestseller lists found the same thing.
Suppose we accept Savage’s narrowed criteria, though. Even then, there’s no particular shortage of young White Male Writers publishing capital-L Literary novels—certainly not enough to claim they’re “vanishing” from this Earth. You don’t even have to look very hard to find them. Just an hour clicking around the websites of the Big Five publishers will do. Alexander Sammartino, for instance, is 34 years old and as blindingly Caucasian as you could ask for, and he published his debut novel
Last Acts (about a dysfunctional father and son who run a gun shop together) with Simon and Schuster this January. It looks promising. Ross Barkan is 35, and he has a sprawling Tom Wolfe-style novel called
Glass Century coming out later this spring. One of my current favorites, Bud Smith, was 40 when he published his novel
Teenager in 2022, and he was still working a construction job in New Jersey when it came out from Vintage. Apparently he was able to navigate the “insular, female-dominated publishing world” Savage bemoans. Other White Male Writers don’t publicize their exact ages (and why should they?), but they appear to be somewhere in their late 30s or early 40s, and have literary novels out from big publishers: Justin Taylor (
Reboot), Greg Jackson (
The Dimensions of a Cave), Brian Castleberry (
The Californians), and so on.
Savage also complains about a dearth of white masculinity in the
New Yorker, but in 100 years of publication, the magazine has had only one female editor in chief (Tina Brown, from 1992 to 1998, or 6 percent of the publication’s history.) And at
The Atlantic, which Savage also denounces for not paying enough attention to white novelists, there has
never been a female editor in chief despite the magazine existing since 1857. Its current leader, Jeffrey Goldberg, notoriously said in 2019 that “almost exclusively white males” are capable of writing good cover stories. So clearly, the idea that “the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down” at some point in the mid-2010s is just plain false. If anything, they’re still the ones operating the pipeline.
What we
can say is that White Male Writers are no longer the predominant kind of writers in the American literary landscape, the way they used to be. This, I think, is what people like Savage and Aguilar are really upset about. It wasn’t too long ago (think mid-2000s) that most of the biggest American novelists were both white and male: Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Michael Chabon, Jonathans Lethem, Franzen, and Safran Foer, the late David Foster Wallace, and so on. Other kinds of writers existed, of course, but they were more marginal. Today, it’s different, with the White Male Writers forming just one current out of many. If anything, female novelists seem to have taken a more prominent role; one of Savage’s more valid observations is that “there are no male Sally Rooneys or Ottessa Moshfeghs or Emma Clines” right now, meaning young novelists who have achieved the same level of mainstream popularity. What Savage doesn’t consider, though, is the possibility that there may be reasons for this
other than some vague woke conspiracy to keep the white man down.
For one, it’s possible that, simply put, no White Male Writer in the last eight-ish years has sent the Big Five publishers anything as interesting or readable as Moshfegh’s
My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Cline’s
The Guest. (I seem to be the last person alive who hasn’t read a Sally Rooney novel, so I’ll withhold judgment there.) This would actually make a lot of sense, because as Savage himself admits, there was a “glut of established white men” cranking out big literary novels for decades. Again, though, he doesn’t think through the implication: that there’s a finite amount of things you can say about “middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience.” That experience has been extensively examined in prose already. To put it another way: suppose you’re an up-and-coming White Male Writer, and you want to write a novel about a young man striving to better himself in the world of 2025. What are you going to write about our current conditions—widening economic inequality, white supremacy creeping into the mainstream, rampant scams and deception—that addresses them better than
The Great Gatsby did? Or if you wanted to write a Musk-inspired novel about rockets, the weird far-right figures who build them, and the vagaries of male sexuality, how are you planning to top
Gravity’s Rainbow? And if you want to write about mid-life crises, divorce, and infidelity, well, Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen have already done every variation on those themes you could possibly think of. The consequence of your demographic group spending decades—centuries, really—at the top of the literary heap is that you burn through the good ideas faster, and by 2025 the matchbox is looking a little empty. Meanwhile, the people who
haven’t gotten as many opportunities in the publishing world could still be going strong, producing things like Isabella Hammad’s
Enter Ghost that just haven’t been done before.
It’s especially ironic that Savage invokes David Foster Wallace for his argument, saying that his “sudden cultural banishment” is an example of the “vanishing” phenomenon at work. In the first place, DFW hasn’t been “banished” or “vanished.”
The Pale King is still sitting comfortably on my shelf (and the library’s shelves, and the shelves at Barnes & Noble), and I don’t expect that to change any time soon. There’s also an international journal of “Wallace studies,” a conference, and a series of critical books dedicated to him. In 2023 Lauren Oyler wrote a long essay about a cruise ship explicitly inspired by Wallace’s
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which was published on the front cover of
Harper’s. If that’s not enduring influence, I don’t know what is. You can even buy Wallace’s famous commencement lecture “This is Water” on a vinyl record, for some reason. What Wallace has been is criticized, fairly, for his sexism and abusive behavior in relationships, and critically panned in essays like Deirdre Coyle’s “Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me.” But this is not the same thing as having “vanished.” If anything, it’s a sign of Wallace’s continued importance, because nobody cares to pick apart the flaws of an author who’s irrelevant.
For his part, Wallace was one of the most savage critics of the generation of White Male Writers who went before him, writing in a 1997 book review that Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Philip Roth were “the Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar literary fiction [and] are now in their senescence.” (Of Updike, Wallace wrote that an acquaintance of his had quipped: “Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”) Decades before Savage’s article, he understood what Savage doesn’t: that the White Male Writers spent so long on top that they were beginning to wear out their welcome, leading readers and the publishing industry to look elsewhere for fresher, more interesting work.
The readership side of the equation, too, seems to have slipped Savage’s mind. Although the extent of the problem has been exaggerated, it’s a well-documented fact that American men and boys read fewer books than women and girls do. The gap is particularly pronounced with fiction: according to one recent estimate, “just 29.5% of men read fiction, compared to 49.2% of women.” The reasons for this are complicated, but gender stereotypes are a big factor. There’s a poisonous cultural idea that masculinity and anti-intellectualism go hand in hand—that literature is an inherently feminine (or perhaps gay) pursuit, of little interest or practical use to the more action-oriented male gender. Or, as one scholar and educator titled his book on the subject,
Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys. This is a ridiculous idea, of course—in fact, it’s a reversal from the equally ridiculous idea that reading novels was more appropriate for men and dangerous or morally suspect for women, which predominated when the novel was first introduced. (This just goes to show how silly and arbitrary gender roles overall are.) But it’s been around in American culture for a long time.
It appears to be getting worse, too, as several figures popular with young men have been actively boasting about how they don’t read books and disparaging reading as a practice. (The vile misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, for instance, claims that he’s “too smart to read” and needs “action” and “constant chaos” in his life instead.) Combine this with the fact that smartphones and TikTok are turning everyone’s brains into deep-fried Spam, and you reach the obvious conclusion: that young men who don’t read are unlikely to write, either. To the extent that the White Male Writer is less common than before, it’s not because the publishing industry is discriminating against them; it’s because technology, capitalism, and the concept of gender have combined in ways that prevent them from being produced in the first place. And that, frankly, is a much worse and more worrying problem.
For that matter, what about the “mockery of male literary ambition”? Here, Savage doesn’t really give any examples of what he’s talking about, beyond the alleged banishment of Wallace and a vague reference to “all those attacks on the ‘litbro.’” So I can only assume that he’s referring to stuff he’s seen on social media, like Dana Schwartz’s popular “Guy in Your MFA” account, which she later adapted into the 2019 satire
The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon. Schwartz’s book pissed a lot of people off when it was released; one Amazon reviewer even accused it of containing “deeply offensive and troubling stereotypes.” But if you actually read past the title—which most of the loudest complainers don’t seem to have done—it’s more an affectionate ribbing than a bitter takedown. Certainly there’s no suggestion that white male writers or readers shouldn’t be
around.
More importantly, this kind of “mockery” is not new. Wallace himself practiced it, as we’ve seen, but the tradition has much deeper roots. Way back in 1871, George Eliot was poking fun at the more pompous kind of White Male Writer with the character of Edward Casaubon in
Middlemarch, who wants to write a huge tome he calls the “Key to All Mythologies” but never quite manages to get it off the ground. (By the way, if you haven’t, read
Middlemarch. They even have it in a charming paperback “Liddlemarch” edition now.) A century later, John Kennedy Toole (himself a White Male Writer) was skewering his own kind in the form of Ignatius J. Reilly, who’s always scribbling what he imagines to be literary and philosophical breakthroughs (but are really pompous drivel) in his Big Chief-brand notepads. Toole’s satire in
A Confederacy of Dunces is far meaner than anything Schwartz or the rest of social media have said, but the White Male Writer tootled along just fine.
It’s not hard to see why so many people over the years have decided to have a little fun at the White Male Writer’s expense. I mean, let’s face it: we are inherently funny people, with our bespectacled squints, coffee shops, little Moleskine notebooks, and flotilla of other aesthetic trappings and affectations. Really, anybody who takes themselves extremely seriously runs the risk of coming out the other side and becoming goofy. For the same reason, politicians and high-ranking religious figures are some of the funniest people to joke about. But if we take Savage at his word, and believe that a little mockery and criticism here and there has made white men “unable to speak directly to their own condition” and “no longer capable of describing the world around them”—well, how pathetic is that? Especially when you consider that other groups of people have received
much worse mockery, and outright abuse, and weathered it just fine. Black writers in the early 20th century were treated abominably by the literary establishment, dealt with segregation and government repression on a day-to-day basis, and certainly weren’t winning the big mainstream awards; it didn’t stop them from doing the Harlem Renaissance. Even Irish writers were looked down upon by the London-based literary establishment for a long time, and powered through to produce Yeats and Joyce. If you care enough about literature, nothing will stop you from writing it. And if a few memes and jokes are enough to halt an entire demographic in its tracks, well, maybe the much-maligned concept of “white fragility” has something to it after all.
