The Modern Reader
Where are the men?
Looking over the best-seller lists, I noticed there’s a lot of women. That’s great for women, long shoved aside by men in all fields—Go women! But when and why did the men drop out?
Up to 2016, men dominated the book charts. The most acclaimed novelists of the 20th century, with few exceptions, were men. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Salinger, Pynchon, and on down the locker room of the All-Stars. There were women, too, of course. Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers, Patricia Highsmith, Toni Morrison, but rarely did they achieve the stellar rankings of the old boys club (or the old white boys club). Although certain women outsold everybody, Jacqueline Susann, Danielle Steel, Barbara Cartland, when it came to serious literary novels, there was a female-shaped hole in the modern literature library.
So, I went back to review the best literary novels of the last fifty years. In 1976, men dominated, except for Agatha Christie, a perennial for decades, and Judith Guest via Ordinary People. Renata Adler, Anne Rice and Octavia Butler were also bright stars, but they couldn’t consistently compete with the guys. By my rough calculations, men wrote 70% of the novels on The New York Times Best Seller List. That percentage increased in the ’80s and ’90s. Despite novels from Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, Amy Tan and Alice Walker, women didn’t make an equivalent dent in the literary consciousness. Not even during the following two decades.
In 2022 something happened. Women outpaced men on The New York Times lists. Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdich, Elizabeth Strout, Ottessa Moshfegh, Barbara Kingslover, and R.F. Kuang, led a registry of successful female novelists. Since then, women have dominated the charts. The percentage of female to male literary novels reversed. Except for genre fiction, Dan Brown, Andy Weir, George R.R. Martin, there ain’t much testosterone left in the new releases shelves.
There are reasons. Men don’t read any more (women buy 80% of novels). Men are distracted by other media. Men are turned off by the feminization of the publishing industry and don’t want Reese Witherspoon to tell them what to read. All true. But, according to my very unscientific polling, men might be making a comeback. So far in 2026, there’s a fifty-fifty ratio between male and female literary authors. With George Saunders, Yann Martel, and Colson Whitehead, men are doing better than they have in a long time. At this point, we’ll take what we can get.