The Absence of Young Male Novelists Signifies the Death of American Culture

Here’s an interesting question: how many white American men born after 1984 have had a literary piece published in The New Yorker? The answer is zero. How did we get here, and who let this happen? Every literary generation used to produce its Roth, Updike, Bellow, Wolfe, McCarthy, or Franzen. Today’s literary establishment shows no interest in producing young men of comparable prominence—especially if they’re straight and white. This is not a new or underdiagnosed problem; in fact, it appears to be a point of pride for the new generation of literary critics and publishers alike. Penguin Random House has...