All the sad young literary men
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British writer and critic Jude Cook announced last month that he's starting a small independent press that will publish mainly literary fiction and memoirs by young men. Mr. Cook told The Guardian that literary fiction, this is highbrow stuff, has come to be dominated by women, quote, giving rise to a situation where stories by new male authors are often overlooked with a perception that the male voice is problematic. After that, we reached out to Jude Cook, who told us he'd rather not talk because, quote, the discourse has got slightly out of hand. Today Explained loves nothing more than out of hand discourse. And so we're going to examine the claim that young white straight men are being shut out of high end fiction.
Most of the classic examples of prestige white male authors are now middle aged or senior citizens. Jonathan Franzen is 65 years old.
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Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are live from New York for the Liberty's home opener with an extra special guest, Brianna Stewart. We talk about the Liberty's newest additions, the best lessons Stewie ever got from Sue, and what it was like to be at the Met Gala this year. And of course, we couldn't let her go without asking her about that 2024 foul call. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
This is Today Explained. My name is Joel Waldfogel, and I'm a professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. I also have a connection with the economics department here.
Very cool. Are you a big fiction reader?
I'm not a big fiction reader.
Oh, no. Why not?
Well, I have been in my life. I have been, of course, in my life. I did a big project after I finished college. I decided I really wanted to read through the important pieces of American literature. So I have been a big reader. But lately, I consume other forms of creative output. Let's put it that way. That's an economist way to say it.
You're watching a lot of Netflix. Totally fine.
You know, that's true. I'm enjoying the fruits of the digital renaissance. That's how I would put it.
All right. The reason that we called you, Joel, is because you wrote a very interesting paper about gender in publishing. Tell me how you became interested in that.
Yeah, sure. I spent some time at the copyright office as the Kamenstein fellow there. And one of the things they were interested in was what's happened to the share of copyrights that have been granted to women. And so I was looking at that and how it's really grown substantially over time. One of the big categories of copyrights, the one that people are most familiar with, is books. And it's remarkable just how the share of copyrights granted to females has risen from really low numbers, if you go back 50 years, to more than 50%. It really passed 50% about five years ago. And that's an unusual kind of statistic, because when you look at other creative or innovative areas, you just don't see that level of balance, that level of female participation relative to male.
Take me back in time and tell me where this story starts.
I can go back to the early 19th century. I can look at the card catalog of the Library of Congress, biggest library in the world. And by looking at the names of authors, I can infer the gender of authors. And back in 1800, about 5% of the books published who were written by women. And it rose very slowly over the 19th century. By 1900, it was still something like 10%.
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