There's a story I keep hearing from male writer friends and acquaintances. They tell me, with variations on the theme: “I found a dozen literary agents right for my book, but when I sent them the manuscript, only six had the courtesy to respond, all with rejections. When I asked what I had done wrong, they said nothing was wrong with the book, but that editors are not considering titles written by straight white males. Then came the question: Do you maybe have Native American ancestry or something?” Considering that in 1970 about 70% of books were written by men, most of them white and probably straight, this is quite a swing.

But don't take my word for it. Joyce Carol Oates, prolific fiction writer and frequent addition to college English literature lists, said, "a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers.” In no way does Oates lean conservative, though she is not forthcoming about her politics. If she's noticing this, something is going on.

In Compact, Jacob Savage lays out the evidence: by 2021, not one white male millennial appeared on the New York Times “Notable Fiction” list; the same in 2022; and only one apiece in 2023 and 2024. He concludes bluntly:

The literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down.

The numbers bear him out. Between 2021 and 2024, the New York Times “Notable Fiction” lists, which tends to highlight debut novels, included an average of about fifty novels per year: 48 in 2021, 51 in 2022, 46 in 2023, and 47 in 2024. That is nearly 200 fiction slots across four years. Yet not one of those slots in 2021 or 2022 went to a white male millennial writer, and only one did in 2023 and again in 2024, for a grand total of 1% of the coveted Notable Fiction slots going to these writers. 

Older established figures, men like Cormac McCarthy, still made the cut. But the next generation of white male writers, those without an existing track record or industry allies, has been systematically locked out. The message could not be clearer: if you are a young, unproven straight white male, publishing has no place for you.

American literature has been built on the energy of young writers, especially young men. Roughly 85 percent of the authors who now form the pre-1950 American canon, nearly all of them male, published their first books before the age of 35. Washington Irving was 26 when he debuted, Herman Melville 27, Stephen Crane 22, F. Scott Fitzgerald 23, Ernest Hemingway 24, William Faulkner 29, John Steinbeck 27, Richard Wright 30. Their youthful debuts did not just launch their careers. They supplied the lifeblood of American literature, the raw brilliance that matured into the classics still taught today.

Today that entire pipeline has been severed. Straight white millennial men — the group that should now be filling the same role as those earlier generations — have been almost completely erased from the literary establishment. What once gave American literature its vitality has been deliberately cut off at the root. It is not merely silencing voices in the present. It is strangling the renewal of literature itself. That is not just exclusion or bias. It is, in the truest sense, literary genocide.

Gatekeepers insist this exclusion is not discrimination but policy. They argue that white men have already had their turn, that publishing now carries a duty to promote “diverse voices,” that the market supposedly demands it, and that moral justice requires it. These claims form the industry’s defense of shutting out an entire demographic, but when examined closely, they collapse under their own contradictions.

The first justification is overrepresentation. Straight white men, they argue, have already dominated the shelves for centuries. Since the canon is “too full” of these voices, the industry must now impose limits on them to make space for others.

Next comes the diversity mission. Agents and editors increasingly describe themselves as cultural gatekeepers. Their job, they say, is not just to publish books but to reshape the future of literature — and that means elevating “marginalized voices,” even if it requires locking out whole demographics. It is why you can find submission guidelines that openly state they are “not accepting queries from straight white men.”

Then comes the market excuse. We are told that readers no longer want books from white male authors, that the public demands diversity. Yet the sales data keep proving otherwise: bestsellers are still often written by the very people the industry insists nobody wants.

Finally, there is the moral cover. Excluding white men is painted not as bias but as justice. It is “equity,” they say — a correction for past wrongs. The rejection letter is not prejudice; it is progress.

It is true that up until the modern era, American women did not really have a seat at the literary table. We were too busy raising families, too uneducated, and sometimes simply ignored. But the solution to that injustice is not to force men to surrender their place. The solution is to add seats.

Publishing should expand the table so that women and minorities can enter without erasing the voices that were already there. Yet today’s industry has chosen the opposite approach. Instead of growth, it practices subtraction. Instead of building a broader, richer literary culture, it narrows it — pitting writers against one another in a zero-sum game of identity. When the focus shifts to equity or, worse, reparations by “redistributing” publication slots, we do not gain new and interesting voices. We make it harder for excellence to rise. Those granted an easier path never develop their voices to their fullest quality, and those excluded never have their voices heard at all.

This is not progress. It is cultural self-cannibalism. By demanding that men be silenced so others can speak, the industry ensures that no one wins — not writers, not readers, not the future of literature itself. 

But here’s the reality: this collective punishment is not only destructive, it is profoundly unfair. Today’s white male writers had nothing to do with the preponderance of their forebears in the canon. They are simply trying to tell their stories, yet the industry tells them, in effect, you are guilty by birth.

It is unfair to readers as well. I have never once picked up a book because of the author’s skin color or chromosomes. I picked it up because I wanted to read the story. And some of the greatest voices in literature would be silenced if today’s submission standards had existed in their time. Tolkien, Lewis, Twain, Bradbury — men whose work shaped generations — would have been stopped at the door, not because they lacked talent but because they were the wrong classification of people: too white, too male, too straight.

And then there is H.P. Lovecraft. Not only would his race, sex, and orientation have disqualified him, but his conservative and sometimes racist views would have marked him untouchable. Yet his cosmic horror rewired an entire genre and continues to influence writers across the spectrum today.

This is what makes the industry’s new regime so destructive. By refusing to even consider a whole category of writers, they are strangling stories before they can take a breath. It is like killing the child in the cradle, or the womb. We will never know what voices might have risen, what novels might have reshaped our world. That is not mere bias. It is something closer to a cultural crime. 

If the Big Five publishers have shut their doors, male writers have not simply given up. Many have taken their work to small presses, hybrid publishers, or the ever-expanding world of self-publishing. Some have turned to crowdfunding, following the trail blazed by authors like Brandon Sanderson, who demonstrated that readers will support the books they want even when the industry will not.

But these alternate paths come with real costs. Without the marketing machine of a major publisher, even the best book is harder to get noticed. Reviews in major outlets are scarce and often nonexistent for self-published or small press-published writers. Awards, which often function as gatekeepers to film and television deals, are nearly out of reach. Book distribution is usually limited to print-on-demand and ebook publication, leaving authors hustling at conventions, marketing on social media, or relying on word of mouth. Success is possible, but the climb is steep.

And yet, what stands out is not despair but determination. Men are still writing, still finding ways to reach readers, even if it means building entire careers outside the system that once claimed to nurture talent. They are absorbing the hardship, shouldering the risk, and refusing to be silenced. It is a testament to their toughness — a refusal to bow to an industry that has declared them unwanted.

The industry calls this progress, but for many, perhaps most, writers it feels like suffocation. It is not only men being pushed aside. Women who refuse to echo the leftist line are dismissed as well — we uppity women who won’t play the part assigned to us. The message is the same: you don’t have a voice unless you can claim the right identity and endorse the approved agenda. Some writers refuse and take the hard road. Others try to disguise themselves with pen names or invented ancestries. Either way, it breeds a quiet desperation. This is the writer’s dilemma.

Part 1: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Gatekeepers

Part 2: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Awards Racket

Part 3: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Market Disconnect

Next up: Part 5: The Writer's Dilemma

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