The demise of white male writer of literary fiction?

Over at Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen has posted the opening paragraphs of Jacob Savage, The Vanishing White Male Writer, Compact (Mar. 21, 2025):

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, 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 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. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

I've blitzed my way through Savage's article finding this:

The antiseptic legacy of Obama-era MFA programs hangs over this generation (all three of the above authors graduated from Iowa). Workshopped to death, shorn of swagger and toxicity —and above all, humor—these books serve more as authorial performances than as novels, a long-winded way of saying, “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good ones, my heart is in the right place.”

Having your heart in the wrong place, unfortunately, isn’t quite the answer either. The best stories by the flamboyantly transgressive and politically incorrect writer Delicious Tacos capture a wonderful samizdat feeling, but anti-woke literature exists in a sort of mirror opposition to a more dominant sensibility. The gonzo provocations of Peter Vack (Sillyboi) or Matthew Davis (Let Me Try Again) tell us less about the world than about how the author wants to be seen. These too are performances. As Sam Kriss pointed out, the anti-woke heel turn is just more identity-driven content—except in these cases, the marginalized identity is that of white men.

And later:

A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV, before deciding that actually, it’s not so bad that men have disappeared. “I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction,” he concluded. “They don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured.”

Someone presenting themselves as GGT over at Marginal Revolution notes:

This has got it backwards. The purchasers of books, especially those of fiction, are overwhelmingly women (at least 60% but probably higher). (I wanted to publish a book in Hungary 15 years ago and the agent told me "only women" read fiction these days. That was 15 years ago. ) White males don't buy books anymore and especially don't read literature. So, simply there is no demand for the white male writer because the white males are playing with computer games, and just don't care about books. And whoeever still cares, are simply not interested in what white guys have to offer. Sorry. No big secret here.

I have no strong or informed opinion on the matter. I don't read much fiction these days, haven't for years. The last novel I read all the way through is Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, which is science fiction, not literary fiction, which is what Savage's article is about. Are white guys being zeitgeisted out, as he argues? Possibly. Or have they simply lost interest, as GGT suggests?

And then there's this lament by Mark Gould, former principle trumpet with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra: