Get with the ladies
A friend sent me the link to this LA Times blog piece about another 100 Best Books list, this time on NPR, that has 93 books by men and 7 by women on it. (And I like how Nicole Krauss is tacked on as the last one, as if the writer was thinking…”Oh yeah, who’s that chick who’s Jonathan Safran Foer’s wife?”)
What’s depressing is how reflective it is of other lists, especially the Modern Library’s list of 100 Best Novels, which included 92 books by men and 8 by women. And almost all of those by white people.
It’s reflective of the history of major literary awards in adult fiction:
Nobel: 94 men, 11 women
Pulitzer: 64 men, 28 women
National Book Awards: 43 men, 15 women
National Book Critics Circle Awards: 26 men, 12 women
PEN Faulkner: 23 men, 5 women
Statistics like these make me want to crawl under the covers. At least in YA fiction, more recently-founded awards, such as the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (started in 1996) and the Printz (started in 2000) have been more egalitarian:
Printz: 5 women, 5 men (hurrah!)
National Book Awards: 8 women, 5 men (hurrah! hurrah!)
Let’s hope that keeps up—it’s yet another reason to celebrate the YA world.
Filed in Books 5 Comments so far
E. Kristin Anderson on 24 May 2009 at 12:04 pm #
Wow – either I had no idea that the statistics leaned so heavily toward men, or Ive been choosing to ignore it! Makes me glad I write YA.
I’d be interested in knowing what the cultural breakdown is for these authors. Are we talking about hundreds of old white dudes dominating our literary culture?
Margo on 24 May 2009 at 5:58 pm #
Yup, they’re pretty much a bunch of old white dudes. The committee who chose the Modern Library list were all white men plus one white woman.
Kelly Ferguson on 30 May 2009 at 8:18 pm #
Hows about
Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Ursula Le Guin, Jane Austin, Eudora Welty…etc. And Alice Munro, who doesn’t write novels but has been, undeniably a very important writer of our era.
I’m going to write my own list.
Margo on 30 May 2009 at 11:54 pm #
Kelly,
Definitely! Alice Munro is my favorite, favorite author in the world–and Lives of Girls and Women and The Beggar Maid can be considered novels (or novels-in-stories). I was thrilled to see she just won the Man Booker International Prize.
Millicent on 14 Nov 2009 at 7:58 pm #
It’s a silly list, ain’t it? Carolyn Kellogg is right about it resembling an intelligent high-schooler’s list of faves. Joyce’s “Portrait” is number 1? (Not, for instance, “Ulysses?”) The omission of Alice Munro and and Barth and Barthelme and Gass and Lessing (who won the NOBEL) while not one but two Salingers are included says all we need say about the maker of this list. And the errors of taste transcend the problems with gender. Two Cormac McCarthys and no David Foster Wallace? No Joan Didion? No Grace Paley? No FLANNERY O’CONNOR???? It’s actually kind of hilarious.