The Plight Of The White Male Novelist

In July of 2022, Joyce Carol Oates tweeted that her literary agent friend told her editors are no longer interested in reading first novels by young white male writers, “no matter how good.” She was saying this in support of an article by former New York Times columnist Pamela Paul, who argued that the publishing industry is being destroyed by “illiberal scolds” keen to stifle free speech. Among Paul’s examples are the industry’s recourse to sensitivity readers, who ostensibly scold authors, and the backlash against 2020 bestseller American Dirt on the grounds that its white author Jeanine Cummins was not the right person to tell the story of poor Mexican migrants. Paul is implying, in other words, that calls for publishing to address its whiteness problem amount to a form of woke censorship. In sharing Paul’s piece and adding her own anecdote about young white men being overlooked, Oates was connecting their fate to Paul’s complaint: White men are the victims of the industry’s takeover by the DEI mafia.

The idea that white male writers today face diminishing opportunities has since occasioned considerable debate and several attempts to lay out in greater detail the forces behind their recent marginalization. Jacob Savage’s explanation is that they are “vanishing” because, having been castigated as toxic masculinists and told there are no “Good White Men,” they no longer feel that they are allowed to have a voice. Tim Lott argues that an industry now dominated by women editors and agents, who are naturally biased toward manuscripts that center their own experiences, is guilty of the same inequality that women once complained about, except now it is men who are excluded.

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