Writing in The New York Times recently, David J. Morris, a creative writing professor, lays out an interesting problem: America has lost her “literary men.” As Morris sees it:

Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales. I see the same pattern in the creative-writing program where I’ve taught for eight years…. As Eamon Dolan, a vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, told me recently, “the young male novelist is a rare species.”

Morris goes on: 

But if you care about the health of our society—especially in the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster—the decline and fall of literary men should worry you.

In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent. This disparity surely translates to a drop-off in the number of novels young men read, as they descend deeper into video games and pornography. Young men who still exhibit curiosity about the world too often seek intellectual stimulation through figures of the “manosphere” such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan.

It’s easy to blast Morris for his swipe at Trump and his dig at Joe Rogan, who often features literate highly erudite and brilliant guests on his show—including from some unexpected sources like David Lee Roth, who during his visit mentioned both Malcolm Gladwell and William S. Burroughs. Morris also bows and scrapes to feminism, noting that men in his classes are required to read The Handmaid’s Tale and that part of the purpose of reading is to make men better allies to leftist women. In 2019 Morris made the following observation: “There are few things in American life more problematic or pratfall-prone than a privileged, straight white man like myself holding forth on the topic of feminism.”  

Awful stuff.

Yet Morris’s basic observation demands a more sympathetic response—and even some respect. David Morris is a former Marine infantry officer who served in Iraq. He graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in history in 1994 and served as a rifle platoon commander in the Third Battalion, Fifth Marines from 1994 to 1998. His first book, Storm on the Horizon, an account of the Gulf War battle of Khafji was published in 2004. He was honored with the Navy-Marine Corps Commendation Medal, the Staige D. Blackford Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, which was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Morris is also correct when he notes that novels “do many things. They entertain, inspire, puzzle, hypnotize. But reading fiction is also an excellent way to improve one’s emotional I.Q. Novels help us form our identities and understand our lives.”

In the interest of constructive criticism, I’d like to make a proposal that Morris might support, even if the publishing industry would not.

Bring back the spirit of Vintage Contemporaries. 

In 1984 Editor Gary Fisketjon launched Vintage Contemporaries, a paperback imprint of Random House. By the end of the 1980s, Vintage Contemporaries would have almost one hundred titles. As Joy Williams once noted, “The line was a mix of reprints and originals, and nearly thirty years later the checklist found in the back of the books reads like a ballot for some Cooperstown of late-20th Century fiction.”

Vintage Contemporaries also featured a lot of male writers who wrote brilliantly about the question of being a man in the latter part of the 20^th century. In a GoodReads list of the best of the series, there are these titles:

A Fan’s Notes, by Frederic Exley 
Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerny
Revolutionary Road, by Richard Butler
Cathedral, by Raymond Carver 
Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy
The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson
Days Between Stations, by Steve Erickson
Dancing Bear, by James Crumley
The Bushwhacked Piano, by Thomas McGuan

Vintage Contemporaries featured fantastic covers by a designer named Lorraine Louie. They were colorful and surreal, with cool color-banded spines, dot matrix accents and dreamy symbolic art. The series was a critical and commercial success, with their most popular title, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, selling 300,000 copies in two years and subsequently being made into a film starring Michael J. Fox.

As the list above shows, many of the books were by men and about male characters trying to navigate life. There were also many male writers at other publishing houses and who produced great work that men could enjoy. The Rebel Angels and What’s Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies. Generation X by Douglas Copeland. The great western Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. In the 1980s McMurtry ran a used bookstore in Georgetown just a few blocks from where I was living as a college student.

These books offered not just action and adventure but deep psychological and spiritual insight into things like male desire and male friendships. As the novelist Ian McEwan once said,

Men are said to be more interested in violence than relationships: they often prefer war or crime novels to ones about couples or families, or so the stereotype goes. But of course there are loads of men writing about relationships and parents and despair and suicide, and all the ways in which love can go wrong. That’s been the engine of English literature for three and a half centuries.

If given a chance, these books will sell.

There are still young male novelists who have the talent to address our world . The publishing industry just has to stop shutting them out. In 2022 famous novelist—and no liberal—Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a post on X: “(a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’)”

Oates was echoed by publishing juggernaut James Patterson, who made similar comments in an interview with the UK’s Sunday Times. Patterson claimed it’s hard for what male writers to get jobs in publishing. It’s “just another form of racism,” he said. “Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes. It’s even harder for older writers. You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males.” Of course, Patterson later apologized for speaking the truth.

In 2015, I wrote a piece parsing the neo-noir crime publisher Hard Case Crime. “The simplest explanation for the popularity of Hard Case Crime,” I wrote,

is that the books, like most pulp fiction and the film noir movies it inspired, are about animus—the Jungian term for male passion. Like a Scorsese film, they depict men on the edge when the world is increasingly hostile to dangerous and flamboyant men. In the 1950s, writers like Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett brought readers into a world where carefully manicured lawns, Jell-O and white picket fences hadn’t taken hold. In He Walked by Night, one of my favorite films from the era, the killer literally works underground, sliding into the dark labyrinth of the city’s sewer system to escape detection. Carl Jung wrote about ‘the shadow,’ the part of us that is dark, horny, creative and a bit crazy. In bright and sunny Eisenhower America, crime fiction and film noir were the shadow.

Three years later, during a political and cultural maelstrom into which I was thrown—the details are described in my book, The Devil’s Triangle—the media discovered my article on Hard Case Crime. They went absolutely berserk. Here’s how one outlet framed my work:

Many of his writings, an MSNBC reporter noted, align with the ideology of the MRA movement (men’s rights activists). In one instance, he praised the “wonderful beauty of uncontrollable male passion.” [MSNBC co-hosts Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle] couldn’t quite wrap their heads around Judge’s praise of men with out-of-control sex drive. MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle gawked in disbelief. “One more time. The wonderful beauty of uncontrollable male passion.”

I had no idea and gave no thought to the question of what the MRA movement is or what they stand for, but as someone who was raised in an artistic, literate, sensitive, but also athletic family, the charges against me (coming from these quarters particularly) seemed bizarre and hysterical. Maybe publishing would be in better shape if they listened to more men like me. Maybe David Morris, the combat veteran and creative writing teacher who is concerned about men and literature, should teach The Devil’s Triangle.