The Vanishing White Male Writer

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

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). 

“The kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo, I think it’s harder for white men,” a leading fiction agent told me. “In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience. The young agents and editors didn’t come up in that culture.” The agent proceeded to list white male writers who have carved out a niche for themselves—Nathan Hill, Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner, Michael Connelly, Adam Ross—but none was younger than Cohen, who was born in 1980. 

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. All true, to a point. But while there are no male Sally Rooneys or Ottessa Moshfeghs or Emma Clines—there are no   white   Tommy Oranges or Tao Lins or Tony Tulathimuttes. 

Some of this is undoubtedly part of a dynamic that’s played out across countless industries. Publishing houses, like Hollywood writers’ rooms and academic tenure committees, had a glut of established white men on their rosters, and the path of least resistance wasn’t to send George Saunders or Jonathan Franzen out to pasture. But despite these pressures, there   are   white male millennial novelists. Diversity preferences may explain their absence from prize lists, but they can’t account for why they’ve so completely failed to capture the zeitgeist.

The reasons for that go deeper. All those attacks on the “litbro,” the mockery of male literary ambition—exemplified by the sudden cultural banishment of David Foster Wallace—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. Instead they write genre, they write suffocatingly tight auto-fiction, they write fantastic and utterly terrible period pieces—anything to avoid grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America.

“The literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down.”

“The antiseptic legacy of Obama-era MFA programs hangs over this generation.”

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a young-ish white male novelist attempting to write your Big Splashy Everything Novel. You want to understand your alienation from yourself, your family, the monoculture around you. You’re a bookish person—you’re a novelist, after all—so you take your toddler son to the bookstore. He’s been asking for a book about whales or fire trucks or trains. These are present, but prominent placement is given to a different kind of book. You see a large display for “Queens of the Jungle,” (“Meet the FEMALE ANIMALS who RULE the ANIMAL KINGDOM”), right next to a YA adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s   Caste   and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg board book for babies.

If you’re a normal white male millennial you probably roll your eyes; if you’re a maniac like me, you text photos of the display to your groupchats; and if you’re a hero or a Democratic congressman, you tell your two-and-a half year old son, come on, gender isn’t even a thing, we really should buy the book about girlboss animals, NPR said it’s great.

But for the last decade or so the question for our novelist has been trickier. That moment at the bookstore was, at worst, an annoyance. How do you describe a flickering moment of alienation without making your novel an exhaustive, and exhausting, chronicle of such things? On the other hand—how do you not describe it? If your own internal monologue can’t be adapted to the page, what can?

Most avoid the question altogether. Some, like Adam Ehrlich Sachs ( Gretel and the Great War ) retreat to the safety of history; others, like Zach Williams ( Beautiful Days ), employ genre (self-described “social science fiction”) to maintain a deep authorial remove from the real world. Still others seek a milieu so distant the cultural transformations on the homefront don’t register. Phil Klay’s   Missionaries , a deep dive into American influence and imperialism in Colombia, could have been written at any point in the past 60 years.

Another solution is to set the aperture narrow enough the outside world barely intrudes. Jordan Castro ( The Novelist ) and Andrew Martin ( Early Work ) focus so intensely on the auto-fictional writing process, on their own literary ambitions and intimate personal dramas, that any larger social questions appear moot. The tech fable (Colin Winnette’s   Users;   Greg Jackson’s   The Dimensions of a Cave ) is a related form of this solipsism—everything is subsumed into the horrors of tech. 

Then there’s the millennial twist on socialist realism—except the goal isn’t to showcase an ideal society, but an ideal   author . In his 2024 story collection   The History of Sound , Ben Shattuck curates a playlist of signifiers—proud historical homosexuals, strong unwavering women, even a Radiolab episode—to reassure the reader that he is the right sort of white man. The title story, soon to be a major motion picture, is about two young men who travel across New England collecting old songs (in other words: Alan Lomax… but gay.). The language is flat, dull, humorless (“The memories of fireflies and swimming naked in the waterfall did nothing but make very fine and long incisions in the membrane of contentedness I’d built up over the years”). But Shattuck’s stories aren’t the product here—he is, oozing sympathy from his own beautiful membrane of contentedness.

Lee Cole, author of the 2022 novel   Groundskeeping , follows a similar path, conveying the proper amount of shame at his working-class Kentucky background (“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”). And Stephen Markley’s 2023 climate change epic   The Deluge , replete with a Jamaican/Native American heroine and a queer neurodivergent Arab-American mathematician, shows that appropriation is acceptable so long as the politics are sufficiently on the nose (“The trauma of that time, especially the storming of the Capitol, lit a new fire under me…”). 

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. 

Julius Taranto may be the only white male millennial novelist who grasps just how poisonous the collapse of the distinction between author and character has been. In   How I Won A Nobel Prize,   he follows a young female physicist who accompanies her mentor to an island off the coast of Connecticut where a shadowy billionaire has created a haven for brilliant but cancelled men to pursue their research. By maintaining distance through the female narrator-protagonist (who, in her muted emotional palette, apolitical bent, and scientific expertise, suspiciously resembles a man), Taranto skillfully avoids the possibility a reader might confuse his character’s sympathies for his own—and nearly succeeds at crafting a novel that actually exists within our cultural moment.

Taranto’s canceled Boomers—licentious, playful, grotesque—feel startlingly real, but he’s unable to offer the same grace to Hew, the narrator’s white male millennial husband. There’s a singular moment in which Hew is asked how he feels:

What are the rules now? I feel there was a time when I could tell you with some confidence whether I had ever done anything very seriously wrong. Something gravely immoral. Now I don’t know. I’m just waiting to be accused of something. My only certainty is that I do not currently understand my past the way I will eventually understand it.

That’s the most we get. Hew disappears for much of the book, and eventually emerges as the novel’s improbable hero—but only by becoming an ultra-woke terrorist, and blowing up the island that Taranto has so intricately constructed. It feels like a cop-out.

It’s no accident that 2024’s best book about millennial rage and anomie, Tony Tulathimutte’s   Rejection , wasn’t written by a white man. A Thai-American author, Tulathimutte captures something genuinely tragic about how identities liberate and trap us—how the frameworks meant to explain our alienation often deepen it. His portrayal of a white male incel enjoys unique vitality because he writes without fear of being identified with his character. No one could credibly accuse him of sharing his incel’s worldview, though even he felt the need to publicly   distance   himself from his character.

But if Tulathimutte, with his perfectly-curated political persona—the droll X posts interspersed with earnest pro-Palestine retweets, the exclusive but supportive writer’s   workshop   run out of his Brooklyn home—can barely pull it off, what hope is there for a white guy with more questionable politics?