"The Vanishing White Male Writer"

Young straight white men used to win literary prizes.

Los Angeles writer Jacob Savage can write Steve Sailer-like articles full of counting, such as his 2023 article “The Vanishing: The erasure of Jews from American life” in The Tablet.

Using YouGov data, Eric Kaufmann finds that just 4% of elite American academics under 30 are Jewish (compared to 21% of boomers). The steep decline of Jewish editors at the Harvard Law Review (down roughly 50% in less than 10 years) could be the subject of its own law review article.

The same pattern holds across America’s elite institutions: a slow-moving downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s—likely due to all sorts of normal sociological factors—and then a purge so sweeping and dramatic you almost wonder who sent out the secret memo….

Many Jews and anti-Semites seemed to assume that there must be secret provisions in the Office of Management & Budget’s racial categorization rules that exempt Jews from being impacted in particular by affirmative action that impacts whites in general.

But, that’s not how it works. At the end of the day, the black HR lady is going to count Jews as white for DEI purposes. So, when the Great Awokening ratcheted up racial quotas in not just the traditional quota-beset cop & fireman-type jobs, but also in the kind of heavily Jewish upscale jobs that had in the past mostly not been the focus of diversity efforts, Jews got hammered hard.

Comb through the dozens of Jewish names for the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship (I count 30-40). You’ll have a much harder time finding them 10 years later (14-16). There were 3-4 Jewish Marshall Scholars in 2014. I don’t see any in 2022.

From 2010 through 2019 there were at least three Jews in every MacArthur Fellowship class, sometimes as many as five or six. The Forward would write effusive columns celebrating the year’s Jewish geniuses. Since 2020, just 0-1 Jews a year have been awarded grants. The Forward hasn’t bothered to take note. …

… Harvard has gone from being 25% Jewish in the 1990s and 2000s to under 10% today. …

According to the Hillel College Guide, Penn’s Jewish population declined from 26% in 2015 to 17% in 2021; NYU’s dropped from 24% to 13%. Princeton, Columbia, and Cornell have seen smaller but significant declines (Brown and Dartmouth, with different institutional priorities, are by all accounts happy exceptions)….

Of the 114 federal judges appointed by Joe Biden (as of this writing), just 8-9 appear to be Jewish—in a field that’s historically been at least 20% Jewish. …

Speaking of LA, a decade ago there were 22 Jews on The Hollywood Reporter’s annual list of the Top 50 Showrunners. In 2022, that’s down to 13. Other than the half-Jewish (and already famous) Maggie Gyllenhaal, you’d have to go back six years to find a single Jew on Variety’s annual list of 10 Directors to Watch. …

There will certainly never be another Larry King or Andy Borowitz, Jews of such astounding mediocrity you wonder what was in the water. …

Never say never.

The new DEI regime treats any disparity between groups as evidence of unfair advantage—and yet we’re supposed to think it’s a coincidence that Jewish representation plummets at the exact moment America frantically pushes to racially rebalance all high-status industries.

Because what is framed as a backlash against America’s “white” centers of power is in many cases a clever sleight of hand. Jews are being disproportionately purged from liberal institutions because Jews disproportionately exist within those institutions.

When activists and journalists and executives talk about how Broadway or NPR or publishing is “too white,” what they really mean is “too Jewish.”

Up through Obama’s re-election in 2012, some elite liberal institutions like Silicon Valley and Hollywood were largely immune from affirmative action. But once Obama was home free, pressure started to build on even big Democratic donors.

And many of the crises of the Great Awokening, such as #MeToo, focused heavily on Jews.

Jews mostly took it like a man … until October 7, 2023, when some started to notice that their putative allies didn’t much like them.

Now, Savage has another counting article, this one in Compact:

The Vanishing White Male Writer

Jacob Savage

March 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). …

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….

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? …

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. …

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?”

… We need novels that provide an honest accounting of the last decade and the profound ruptures it brought to American life. Because the social and political environment in which a white male novelist, in an article bemoaning the disappearance of male novelists, is forced to say the world doesn't need more male novelists, seems like it might be fertile ground for a work of fiction.

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.

One thing that the publishing industry is missing out on by going all-female all-the-time is that men make much better critics at drawing attention. Women tend to be agreeable and non-hierarchical, so they aren’t good at starting arguments over which writers are best. In contrast, men like arguing with men over greatness.

For example, it seems like there must not have been many women writers in the past because it’s hard to remember more than a few of them. But, there have always been a large fraction of female bestseller writers over the last 250 years. For example, in the first four decades of the 20th Century, about three-eighths of the top 10 selling novels in America each year were by women authors:

But most of the bestselling female authors of the era, with a few exceptions such as Edith Wharton, aren’t remembered much anymore. Women tend to be more focused on the Latest Thing than in cultural immortality.

So, in today’s age of women writers, there is strikingly little interest in literature.