The amusing thing is that the author, and the publishing industry, imagines this somehow says anything about the decline of young white literary men as opposed to the death of the literary mainstream:
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.
In other words, they’ll publish inferior work that no one wants to read, their audiences will dwindle, and their publications and awards will become completely irrelevant until their only hope for survival is lobbying for government grants based on the idea that they used to be important.
Meanwhile, young white men will continue to write, continue to innovate, and continue to invent just as they have been doing for centuries. And they will build new institutions to replace those their ancestors built, and perhaps next time, they won’t fall for all the arguments about the need to relax their rules and lower their standards in order to let the women qualify.
Does anyone think the Hugo and Nebula winners of today are better than they were 50 years ago? Does anyone believe that what is published in The Atlantic matters anymore? Of course not. We don’t even read any of these things anymore, precisely because they no longer matter.
No magazine has ever discussed my fiction. And yet the readers compare it to Tolkien (unfavorably) and Martin (favorably), and when the playing field was level – as opposed to algorithmically managed – my works on political philosophy were outselling both Marx and Machiavelli.