The Vanishing White Male Writer

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.

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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?

Maybe, as some like to point out, the vibe is shifting. There are promising literary releases on the horizon. But for all the talk about the new moment, about how things are finally opening up, the stifling cultural environment of the last decade isn’t quite over. While Andrew Boryga (Victim) and Tony Tulathimutte are free to skewer identity pieties, white male millennials are still unable to speak directly to their own condition.In some ways that inability is their condition. It is striking how few of these novels deal with relationships and children, professional and personal jealousies, the quiet resentments or even the unexpected joys of shifting family roles.Instead a fever urge to disclaim appears over and over, unremarked upon and unexplored—both in print and in real life. “I mean, white guys still run the world, especially in that gross nexus of higher ed and yawny high lit,” one millennial writer wrote me, as if reassuring himself of phantom powers he no longer possessed. He had just been fired from his adjunct teaching job, and his agent had told him his latest novel was unlikely to sell. But he insisted my line of inquiry was unsavory. “What’s the point in even being upset about such supposed indignities as not being published as a white guy?”{snip}White male boomer novelists live in a self-mythologizing fantasyland in which they are the prime movers of history; their Gen X counterparts (with a few exceptions), blessed with the good sense to begin their professional careers before 2014, delude themselves into believing they still enjoy the Mandate of Heaven (as they stand athwart history, shouting platitudes about fascism). But white male millennials, caught between the privileges of their youths and the tragicomedies of their professional and personal lives, understand intrinsically that they are stranded on the wrong side of history—that there are no Good White Men.

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