“Warren’s confusion brings to light a deep and longstanding anxiety in the world of letters about the miscegenation of literature and commerce. Worthy books, the reasoning goes, don’t sell at airports — never mind that every airport bookstore in America and beyond carried copies of Freedom. In the opinion of those of Warren’s ilk, women write easily digestible works of commercial fiction, while serious male writers — and some smart cookies like Atwood — write challenging, worthy books that a guileless public could never encounter without the help of resourceful critics. Never mind that Franzen has said in interviews that he tries to write entertaining, easy-to-follow books in order to compete with television, or that Atwood’s books are regularly found in the young-adult section of libraries.
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— Eugenia Williamson’s article about the literary gender bias at NPR is worth reading, although I’m not sure that singling out NPR for reviewing male writers 67% of the time makes sense when 60% of all novels put out last year by major publishing houses were by men. I mean, yes, that means NPR is worse than it should be, but also we’re not working with a huge statistical sample here.
