Compact magazine last week published one of the most disturbing yet culturally important articles of the decade. In The Vanishing White Male Writer, author Jacob Savage describes the cold war against male Caucasian fiction authors waged by the left-dominated publishing industry since, no surprise, the Obama years. Savage starts his piece with irrefutable proof of this outrage, citing the golden fleece for young novelists, The New York Times’ “Notable Fiction” list.
Message to the woke gatekeepers: White guys have universal problems … We might have something enlightening to say about them.
In 2012, this list included seven white American men under 43, followed by six in 2013 and 2014. Then, as Savage puts it, “The doors shut.” There was not a single young white male millennial on the 2021 and 2022 lists, only one in 2023, and one again in 2024. In other words, only two of 72 millennials on the list were white men.
Savage cites additional chilling evidence of the young white male lockout: zero in Vulture magazine’s 2024 year-end fiction list, zero in Vanity Fair, zero in The Atlantic. Of the 53 millennial fiction writers featured on the Esquire year-end book list in the last five years, one was a white American male. For this group, even getting to the known authorial stage has been effectively blocked.
Since 2020, no white male has been nominated for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction out of 25 nominations. None for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, out of 70 finalists. And none for the National Book Award, out of 14 finalists. The prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford also has no white male fiction and poetry fellows, and in fact has had only one since 2020.
Savage ends the data stage of his article with a brutal data bite. Not one white man born after 1984 has had a work of literary fiction published in The New Yorker, out of around 30 millennials who have. Savage provides a verdict for all this: “The antiseptic legacy of Obama-era MFA programs hangs over this generation.” He adds, “The more thoughtful pieces on this subject tend to frame the issue as a crisis of literary masculinity, the inevitable consequence of an insular, female-dominated publishing world.”
Savage does a brilliant deep dive in explaining the dearth if not death of white male fiction. “All those attacks on the ‘litbro,’ the mockery of male literary ambition … have had a powerfully chilling effect. Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them.”
The article gives several sad examples of young white male writers who kneel before the woke publishing overlords, such as Lee Cole (Groundskeeping). Cole assumes the right amount of shame at his working-class Kentucky background in his book. “They supported Trump, chiefly because of his promise to bring back American manufacturing. Any hope I may have had for them to renounce their support was … completely gone.”
I should like to add to Savage’s insightful criticism. If white millennials have a tough time getting fiction mainstream published, older heterosexual white male scribes not named Grisham, King, Brown, Patterson, Child, or the like have it nigh impossible.
I came late to the novelists club, after two prior careers as a journalist then screenwriter. I tried to get my fiction to any of the Big Five publishers but never got to the plate. The few major agents who read it liked my writing but not my white face, even with a Latin shade. Two of them told me so in more diplomatic terms. Even though my second book Paper Tigers is a Great American Novel, and my latest The Washington Trail, a shockingly prescient political detective thriller about DOJ skullduggery aimed at preventing a former President from retaking the White House. All four have done well for their boutique publishers despite their limited promotional reach.
Message to the woke gatekeepers: White guys have universal problems. They have mothers who died recently, brothers with dementia, problematic wives and girlfriends, and tempting alternatives. We might have something enlightening to say about them. We don’t have to be singled out, but neither should we be shut out.
We might even create legendary new heroes to follow Odysseus, Beowulf, Robinson Crusoe, David Copperfield, the Three Musketeers, Huckleberry Finn, Mowgli, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, Shane, and James Bond. Or complex successors to Captain Ahab, Rodion Raskolnikov, Captain Nemo, Jay Gatsby, Willie Stark, and Vito Corleone.
White Supremacist Shakespeare
We’ll never come close to the greatest writer of all time, the white man who created Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Falstaff, Romeo and Juliet and — talk about cultural appropriation — Othello. And now he too is being cancelled by the woke mind virus: “Shakespeare’s birthplace to be decolonised after ‘white supremacy fears,’” blared a recent UK Telegraph headline.
The story relates how a trust in Stratford-upon-Avon is dishonoring its immortal native son, William Shakespeare, as a symbol of white supremacy. Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust has declared that some items in its collections may contain “language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful.” It is now “decolonising” its invaluable collection to “create a more inclusive museum experience.”
I have a Shakespearean response from The Tempest to that trust, and to the anti-white male publishing bloc. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
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