On May 17, one of the coolest events in my area will take place. The Gaithersburg Book Festival is just a couple of miles from where I live in Maryland. The festival features some of the most interesting authors representing all different genres.

There are also no conservatives.

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Actually, it may be a stretch to say there are zero conservatives at the Gaithersburg Book Fair. Yet most of the titles seem to lean left. Take this description one of the featured authors: “Jubi Arriola-Headley (he/him) is a Black queer poet, storyteller, first-generation United Statesian and the author of two collections of poems: Original Kink (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020), recipient of the 2021 Housatonic Book Award; and Bound (Persea Books, 2024).” 

There are books about abortion — Amanda Becker’s You Must Stand Up, The Fight for Abortion Rights in Post-Dobbs America — Manifestos about how America has to change, and, of course, a volume rejecting traditional biological sex, Sex is a Spectrum by Agustin Fuentes.

There is a science fiction title, John Scalzi’s When the Moon Hits Your Eye. Scalzi is also known for his liberal views and once took a picture of himself wearing a dress.

I want to be fair, there are also some more mainstream titles. Rick Atkinson will be there. He’s the author of The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780. There are also several novels from different genres — crime, romance, and fantasy.

What’s missing are young males who are producing literary fiction that is marketed to young men. Writing recently in Compact, Jacob Savage noted the phenomenon of “the vanishing male white writer.” Savage traced the decline of “young white men in American letters” by looking at the New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012, the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43. In 2013, there were six, and in 2014, there were six. “And then the doors shut.”

By 2021, Savage observes, “there was not one white male millennial on the ‘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 also “no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s.” Esquire “has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.”

Writing in the New York Times recently, David J. Morris, a creative writing professor, says that America has lost its “literary men.”

“Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit,” Morris wrote. “Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales. I see the same pattern in the creative-writing program where I’ve taught for eight years. … As Eamon Dolan, a vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, told me recently, ‘the young male novelist is a rare species.’” 

Morris argues that “if you care about the health of our society…the decline and fall of literary men should worry you. In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally.” Men “descend deeper into video games and pornography.” Missing are novels, which “improve one’s emotional I.Q. Novels help us form our identities and understand our lives.”

Even famous liberal writers see the problem. In 2022, Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “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. This is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’” 

James Patterson made similar comments in an interview with the U.K.’s Sunday Times. Patterson claimed it’s hard for white male writers to get jobs in publishing. It’s “just another form of racism,” he said. “Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes. It’s even harder for older writers. You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males.” Patterson later apologized for telling the truth.

Male novelists, both black and white, changed my life as a child in the 1970s and then as a young man in the 1980s and 1990s. There were the classics, such as The Lord of the Rings, The Iliad, and Don Quixote, to be followed by works such as The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, and A Separate Peace. In 1984, when I was in college, editor Gary Fisketjon launched Vintage Contemporaries, a paperback imprint of Random House. As author Joy Williams once noted, “The line was a mix of reprints and originals, and nearly thirty years later the checklist found in the back of the books reads like a ballot for some Cooperstown of late-20th Century fiction.”

Vintage Contemporaries featured a lot of brilliant male writers. In a GoodReads list of the best of the series, there are these titles:

A Fan’s Notes by Frederic Exley. 

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Butler.

Cathedral by Raymond Carver. 

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.

The Sportswriter By Richard Ford.

Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson.

Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson.

Dancing Bear by James Crumley.

The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane.

In the 1980s, there were also lots of male writers who were with different publishing houses and who produced work that men could enjoy: The Rebel Angels and What’s Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies. Generation X by Douglas Copeland, The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. There was also the great western Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. In the 1980s, McMurtry ran a used bookstore in Georgetown just a few blocks from where I was living as a college student. Several recent articles have noted that Lonesome Dove has recently experienced a surge in popularity, this for a novel that is 40 years old. Why? Because the American library elite has discouraged the formation of the next Larry McMurtry.

These books offered more than just action. They had insights into work, sex, religion, and psychology. As the novelist Ian McEwan once observed, “Men are said to be more interested in violence than relationships: they often prefer war or crime novels to ones about couples or families, or so the stereotype goes. But of course there are loads of men writing about relationships and parents and despair and suicide, and all the ways in which love can go wrong. That’s been the engine of English literature for three and a half centuries.”

Today, men looking for similar themes have to go to smaller publishers. In 2015, I wrote a piece celebrating publisher Hard Case Crime. “The simplest explanation for the popularity of Hard Case Crime,” I wrote, “is that the books, like most pulp fiction and the film noir movies it inspired, are about animus—the Jungian term for male passion. Like a Scorsese film, they depict men on the edge when the world is increasingly hostile to dangerous and flamboyant men. In the 1950s, writers such as Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett brought readers into a world where carefully manicured lawns, Jell-O, and white picket fences hadn’t taken hold.” 

Three years later, during a Washington political firestorm I was swept up in, the media discovered my article on Hard Case Crime. They went absolutely berserk. Here’s how one outlet described my work: “‘Many of his writings, an MSNBC reporter noted, align with the ideology of the MRA movement (men’s rights activists).’ In one instance, Judge praised the ‘wonderful beauty of uncontrollable male passion.’ [MSNBC co-hosts Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle] couldn’t quite wrap their heads around Judge’s praise of men with out-of-control sex drive… Ruhle gawked in disbelief. ‘One more time. The wonderful beauty of uncontrollable male passion.’” 

I knew nothing about the men’s rights movement. I was just writing about men.

DEMOCRATS WILL THANK TRUMP FOR THE NORMS HE DESTROYED

In 2022, I published a book about my experience being mauled by the media. The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi is about politics but also about the writers who shaped me — Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Salinger, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Robert Heinlein, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Larry McMurtry, Lester Bangs, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter Thompson. My book was ignored by the legacy media.

When reviewing a different book on politics that was written by a leftist adversary of mine and that briefly referred to me, New York Times book critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote that “one longs for more about Mark Judge” in the book. Jacobs and the New York Times have refused to review The Devil’s Triangle. And despite growing up just a couple of miles away, the Gaithersburg Book Festival has never offered an invitation to attend.