Why I Mostly Read Dead White Men
because they’re the best
A particularly absurd outgrowth of the identity-politics craze—which for about two decades now has ranked as the most reliable way to make a smart person dumb—has been the tendency of teachers, administrators, and even ordinary readers to choose books on the basis of the author’s “diversity.”
I’m sure this practice had humble and defensible beginnings. In the early days, it was probably nothing more than an earnest and long-overdue request to mix in a few more female voices. Then it became advisable to add some color—the darker, the better. By now, I assume it is essentially mandated that every other book be written by a left-handed neuroqueer.
Like so much else, this good idea in moderation was made stupid by excess. I knew it had reached the apex of idiocy when I caught myself padding my list of favorite books with women and Black authors just so I wouldn’t seem narrow-minded, misogynist, or racist. (Major thanks to Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin for their help in this endeavor.) But the fact was—and still is—that most of my favorite authors are dead men: to be precise, white Western men who died of tuberculosis around the age of forty-four.1
As the demand for ever-new fronts of diversity has expanded, who has been getting crowded out the back but my beloved DWM? Actually, the dead ones—being in bulky coffins stuffed into closets or shoved behind couches—have a better chance of staying. It’s much easier to send the living schlub near the door on his merry way. “Go be an investment banker or something,” these all-inclusive folk say as they raise a justified foot and boot the living white male out—the more enthusiastically if they are white themselves. Thus I concluded, long ago, to direct my writing to a posthumous audience—to be fair, mainly for a different reason altogether, but partly because I sensed the changing winds. “People like me” were being culled from art.
You know the funny thing about this, right? Readers have always clamored for diversity. A book is just another form of travel—albeit a sacred one to those who choose it—and what is travel but the pursuit of novelty? For every hundred travelers who promise to return to a place, only a handful ever do—unless they own a house or something anchoring them there—because the truth is that, when push comes to shove, a new place beckons harder.
In the context of books, “new” does not necessarily mean a different author. I daresay Herman Melville’s Redburn and Moby-Dick are different enough to justify travel into each. Still, I can understand wanting to sample from as many authors as possible. Only in our current age of aesthetic regression, however, would we reduce artists of fundamentally different sensibilities to the almost-administrative categories of skin color or sex, as if Jules Verne, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nathaniel Hawthorne were somehow more similar to one another than to W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, or Willa Cather. The whole notion is absurd on its face, and yet this kind of thinking passes as some of the most sophisticated a literary person can have—and indeed put into practice.
If readers read for diversity of outlook anyway—as part of their desire for adventure, which requires novelty and surprise—then all we’ve done by emphasizing certain kinds of diversity is belittle the concept itself. By saying, in essence, this short list represents the main ways in which people differ, we’ve blinded ourselves to the much longer and more nuanced list of what actually makes people different—one that is, I would argue, far more humanistic, generous, and inclusive. We have acted, in the words of Thoreau, “as if the value of a man is in his skin, that we may touch him,” and not in his sensibility—however that is formed.
I mean, doesn’t the mission of identity politics—to force a thin, threadbare version of diversity down everyone’s throat—fly in the face of everything we know? Do any of us choose or maintain friendships on the basis of skin color, gender, or sexual orientation? (If we do, the relationship is shallow and short-lived.) Do “diverse” authors of ostensibly the same type—say, Black women of postwar Europe—all write about the same thing or in the same way? (If they did, there’d be no point in reading more than one.) If diversity is supposed to help us appreciate differences of perspective, then I’m not sure we’ve even begun to enumerate the many sources of that difference. But we’ve done an excellent job of closing the door on some of them.
In the first half of my childhood, I was told not to judge a book by its cover. Then, all of a sudden, that was exactly what I was supposed to do. Shame on us.
You Can’t Argue with Math
So, why do I read mostly dead white men? Because I like reading people who are dead, and most dead writers in the English language are white men. It’s hard to argue with math.
Alright, you say, scratching your head. Why do you like dead people so much? Well, I’ll tell you why:
Dead people don’t write about current events.
Why would I ever want more of my current moment? Isn’t my life already steeped in the zeitgeist? Even if I avoid the news (which I do) and try to consume as little modern content as possible, I still live in the modern world. I still have eyes and ears, which unfortunately work continuously. What kind of insanity would lead me to feed these senses more of what they’re drowning in? No, I already know what it’s like to live my life now; I want to know what it was like to live someone else’s life, at some other time.
Dead people don’t move much.
I’m a bit unique in that I don’t like to waste time, and there’s nothing worse than idolizing someone only to discover that they sucked, or that their work was fraudulent, inaccurate, or actually not all that profound. If I am going to put someone on a pedestal, let it be someone tested by time. Let the work be something the decades—or ideally centuries—have already vetted. For “I have no doubt,” as Thoreau says, “that time discriminates between the good and the bad.”
Imagine if, instead of reading the collected short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I had apprenticed myself to Kanye West. What a sorry position I’d be in now—what manifold opportunities I’d have to bemoan my wasted time. But the reputations of the deceased and their works are fairly stable, making investments in them relatively secure. Today’s bestseller might be obsolete in ten years; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn won’t be.
There is another sense in which this logic applies: the pile of past writing does not grow much. Consider that more has been published in the fourth quarter of this year than in any decade of the nineteenth century. A reader can’t keep pace with that. They can’t make discernible progress. No one can form a coherent impression of “where American literature is headed.” It’s too big, too rough a beast, and that makes me want to leave it alone. As I wrote in What I Ask of My Experience, it’s okay to make a task hard—just don’t make it impossible.2
Dead people leave inheritances.
It is hard to describe the wealth of information that an old voice carries with it. And I hesitate to say “information,” because often what I am talking about is more specifically a sense or impression—a feel for what it was like to be alive then, under those circumstances. We are commonly ignorant of the baggage we carry around as a result of living in our particular time, baggage which includes our slang. Will people say “that slaps” in 100 years to describe something that is good and hits the spot? Will they even say “hits the spot”? If not, their mind will be expanded to know how we once expressed an experience they can still recognize. Reading the work of those long gone is a diluted form of learning a new language.
Where Differences Live
In the end, my controversial take boils down to a disappointingly mundane mathematical fact. If I prefer to read authors who have passed on—which I very much do, for the reasons listed above—then I’d have to bend over backwards not to read primarily white men. My tastes are not the problem; the cultural pressure to qualify them is.
I don’t deny that a woman from Saudi Arabia has a different perspective than I; I deny that my neighbor down the street has the same. “I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds closer together,” Thoreau says, and at times I would almost say the same of shared experience.
Diversity of thought, impression, sensibility, style, pathos—that is what I care about, not what language an author spoke, what form of writing they specialized in, or what color skin they had. I daresay it would be insulting for me to prioritize the latter over the former—to insist that Montaigne was a great essayist and not simply a great writer.
Ultimately, I care about what good writers care about. Good writing is the ability to make me care. If a writer cares deeply about one of the small bundle of attributes identity politics has elevated—if they want to tell me about their experience as one of those descriptors—then I’m all ears. I am not denying that such things matter, but what I won’t do is tell the author what distinguishes them before they tell me. After all, identity politics is a farce not because it misidentifies a few sources of human difference, but because it insists that those are the only—or the most important—ones.
So, I read mostly dead white men because I like reading dead authors, and most of them are (or were) white men. As yet another dead white man said—of a very different sort, this one—“So it goes.”
I’m only half joking. My beloved Thoreau and Chekhov died at 44 of tuberculosis. My sweet Kafka died at 40 of tuberculosis. My dearest Fitzgerald died at 44, but of a heart attack. And D.H. Lawrence, with whom my relationship is still budding, died at 44 of tuberculosis.
This brings me to an interesting side point. I’ve always had strong feelings about the ratio of work required to write a piece versus the work required to read it. It seemed to me the ratio should be at least 10:1—otherwise readers have no chance of chipping away at the endless material continually being produced. The imbalance in overall output is now permanent, of course, but if the ratio is maintained, we readers have one consolation, at least: if we like an author, we can plausibly read their complete works in a few years of dedicated effort.