Literary Gatekeepers Must Be Gatekept

How Literary Agents Are Destroying the Potential for Great Literature

There is a war against great literature in our culture, and writers are unhappy. Stephen Akey, writing for The New Republic, jokes that he is doomed because his book is about neither vampires nor childhood trauma. Over on her blog, Mary W. Walters observes that literary agents, with their demand for cookie-cutter pitches and trending topics, are killing literary talent. Even the highly-credentialled and traditionally published author Erik Hoel laments the difficulty of securing a publishing deal. With talented authors being kept out of traditional publishing at alarming rates, good literary fiction is on the decline, and an increasing number of readers and writers alike are turning to self-publishing and non-traditional outlets such as Substack to both disseminate and consume high quality fiction. After speaking to a handful of talented self-published writers who just couldn’t seem to get their foot in the door—as well facing over 250 rejections before securing two offers from literary agents, only to have both agents ghost me during the signing process—the consensus is clear: literary agents—the gatekeepers of traditional publishing—are to blame for the decline of good literature in our modern world.

One need only set foot inside a Barnes & Noble to see what I mean. Walk inside this awe-inspiring bookstore—a place that once fueled my childhood literary ambitions—and you will be met with fiction bookstands featuring titles that belong to one of two categories: smutty commercial slop or literary fiction that unapologetically promotes far-left causes. Gone are the days of introspective, serious novels that focus on craft and ideas; here to stay are beach reads, romantasies, and Sally Rooney’s far-leftist literary mob. That these are the particular novels that “trend” these days is telling, yet such literary proclivities arise not because authors have collectively abandoned the creation of good, apolitical literature—rather, literary agents actively keep more traditionally-minded and talented authors—most notably white men—completely out of the game.

The frustration that many of my Substack colleagues have experienced at being barred from entering the elusive world of traditional publishing has sparked countless Internet conversations about the necessity of literary agents in the first place, with some writers citing impossible standards of getting noticed or outright agent unprofessionalism, among other problems. And while I experienced my own share of frustration with literary agents, who seemed categorically and collectively opposed to letting my novels The Lilac Room and The Leverkühn Quartet pass through the traditional publishing pipeline, I did end up connecting with several smart agents along the way—those who understood literary tradition and who helped me make my book shine through the Revise & Resubmit process—and do not believe that the abolition of the literary agent profession is the solution. Good writers, after all, deserve to have their writing differentiated from the mediocre Internet crowd by having their novels appear in bookstores, publicized in mainstream media outlets, and promoted on social media. After all, not all writing is good writing (contrary to what professors in my department at Columbia University might have you believe), and because good writing is less ubiquitous than literary agents might have us believe, the rare well-written and philosophically profound novel deserves to shine—and its author deserves the widespread accolade that comes with it. The role of the gatekeeper, then, is to filter through the many half-baked, low-quality ideas and to identify truly great talent. The problem is that the vast majority of these gatekeepers—literary agents—are doing precisely the opposite: they are letting bad writing through and keeping good writing out.

There are two reasons that literary agents not only welcome but celebrate bad writing—and keep good writing out. The first of these is perceived widespread commercial appeal—or lack thereof—of a given query. We live in the unfortunate age of genre fiction—the world of low attention spans and BookTok that leads readers to gravitate towards the likes of Colleen Hover or E.L. James. One need only read the opening page of Hoover’s It Starts with Us or James’s most recent novel The Missus to deduce that these women are no twenty-first century incarnations of Shakespeare—they are barely even Theodore Dreisers or Ayn Rands, fiction writers often heavily critiqued for the clunkiness of their prose. These are writers who, in about nine out of ten cases, write no better than the sixteen-year-olds I coach through the college essay process, yet are granted entry into the coveted world of mainstream fiction because their hackneyed and pornographic stories sell. This would be all right, perhaps, if literary agents recognized the relative place of these sorts of books in the literary hierarchy, admitting that these erotic, platitude-ridden books are, indeed, barely books and simply exist to make the industry money—instead, literary agents pass these works off as respectable novels and publicly tout It Ends with Us or even Fifty Shades of Grey as all-time favorites. One must wonder whether, at this point, it is even appropriate to call such a professional—someone who considers Fifty Shades of Grey to be not only a respectable book but one of their all-time favorites—a literary agent. Meanwhile, writers who know how to string a sentence or two together are told by these same members of the literary Praetorian Guard that their book simply won’t sell. In my case, while I might not be a twenty-first century incarnation of Shakespeare, I am most certainly a much better writer than Colleen Hoover—as are most hard-working querying authors—and to be rejected by Hoover’s agent seems if not outright dystopian then at least a bit unreasonable.

But the dumbing down of literature into uninspired genre fiction is not solely to blame for the lack of great twenty-first century literature in our bookstores. After all, literary fiction writers such as Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney still make it onto our shelves—and boy do they make it. Rooney has become the most famous celebrated writer of our generation and, despite her bizarre Marxist tendencies, brings home a hefty paycheck from book sales. Yet Rooney and Moshfegh have one thing in common that unites virtually all writers of literary fiction today: they stand very far to the left politically—and their writing reflects their progressive values. Today, literary agents, many of whom skew even more far to the left than the authors that they represent, are interested in literary stories not from good writers who can craft beautiful sentences but from BIPOC, LGBTQ+ or other marginalized writers—and, in many cases, they wish to hear exclusively from these groups. As literary agents demand increasingly absurd themes on their manuscript wishlists—queer YA books based on Gilgamesh, Two-Spirit guidebooks, and politically-minded road trip narratives, to name a few—authors are increasingly forced to virtue signal by creating characters of a certain race or gender in order to conform. With this damper on creative freedom, virtually all literary fiction of the twenty-first century conveys the same message through the same cast of characters: be diverse and woke—or else.

Though one might make the argument that these sorts of woke books will bankrupt the publishing industry, forcing literary agents to shift the mean political messages of the books they represent more towards the center (though we may wonder why literary books must contain such political messages in the first place), because few outliers such as Rooney and Moshfegh perform overwhelmingly well, the publishing industry thrives on the illusion that audiences demand woke fiction, and agents and publishers keep renewing their absurdist circus performance for another season. After all, agents themselves seem to genuinely believe in the call for marginalized voices in fiction and uphold these beliefs in their personal lives (or, at least, on their Twitter pages). But as an overbearing number of great writers are kept out of the literary world, one must wonder what these agents and publishers really have to gain. After all, shouldn’t a great work of literature speak for itself? And shouldn't that, in turn, bring both agents and publishers great financial prosperity?

After interacting with literary agents for almost a year now, I suspect I have landed on the reason that literary agents haven’t yet come to the exceedingly obvious conclusion that publishing great literature above all else should lead to long-term success in the industry: the sort of person who becomes a literary agent in the twenty-first century is simply not equipped to discern good writing from middle-school-level blather. Literary agents today are not only blindsided by myopic political beliefs but also do not actually care about good literature—because the sort of person who cares about maintaining and growing the literary canon rarely becomes a literary agent. The rare philologists of our society become writers, artists, scholars, visionaries, or professors (though, perhaps, not anymore). The literary agent, on the other hand, is simply a glorified salesperson who sits on a meager salary and goes home to read the same sorts of books that he or she pushes out—the haphazard work of genre fiction or politically-charged literary narrative—and the sorts of agents who genuinely care about discovering new literary voices are rare commodities who will seldom speak to new, unpublished writers. Many agents today simply study English for the political convenience that the major provides and, in many cases, know close to nothing about literature at all. I was appalled to learn, for instance, that an acquaintance I knew several years ago who had aspirations to become a nurse—a young woman by whom I found myself quickly bored because she was unable to carry on a conversation about anything remotely intellectual—landed a role at as an associate literary agent at a large agency in New York. With standards for traditionally-published authors impossibly high, we must ask ourselves—why are there no standards for becoming a literary agent?

Indeed, it is laughably simple to become a literary agent. While most agents are required to hold some form of bachelor’s degree—though, as I mentioned above, not even necessarily in English or a related field—becoming credentialed as an agent takes no longer than six weeks, with many agents completing the famous Columbia Publishing Course and officially hitting the workforce as early as twenty-two. While there’s nothing wrong with starting a career at twenty-two, and while many twenty-two-year-old readers might outshine their older counterparts in literary knowledge, the substantial lack of barriers to entry for the literary agent profession makes it possible for virtually anyone to enter the profession—and, with just a rudimentary knowledge of sales, succeed in it. What we as writers, spending countless hours toiling over unedited manuscripts or losing nights of sleep over Dostoyevsky, forget about literary agents is that these individuals may have never read a real work of literature in their lives. These are the sorts of people who categorize books written in 2009 as “classics” and struggle to use proper grammar in their Tweets—or at least demonstrate a cogent grasp of the English language. And asking someone who has never read Dostoyevsky or Dickens to identify a twenty-first century contender for these literary masters is as frivolous as asking a blonde teenager with an astrology obsession to pick up a telescope and discover a new constellation. Yet with virtually no objective benchmarks for this vainglorious army of gatekeepers, we are doing worse—we are destroying the potential for good literature in the modern era.

Tweets from literary agents sourced from X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday, January 18, 2025.

And while we may give credit to the rare talented literary agent—the old-school agent who might have discovered the gifts of Isaac Bashevis-Singer or Joyce Carol Oates, or even the occasional recent grad with a true passion for discovering the next great work of art—these sorts of agents are few and far in between, for the vast majority of literary agents today seem to have little interest in true literature—and for good reason, for why might we expect a lover of great literature to become a literary agent—a middling salesperson?

It’s time we change this model. I have no qualms about the gatekeepers in publishing—literature should, in fact, be gatekept to allow talented authors their due, but we have come a long way in the wrong direction. Today, as we keep many talented authors out and let talentless viragos in—alongside their sex fantasies that should be kept in the bedroom or their Marxist apologism disguised as literary fiction—we must wonder, why are there no gatekeepers for the gatekeepers, and what gives these talentless salespeople the authority to judge the manuscripts of budding great writers—the true revolutionary thinkers of our civilization? And while I have no answers to how we got here, one thing is for certain—if we are to allow more great literature in, we must show these particular gatekeepers the way out. Literary agents must, at the very least, demonstrate some capacity for discerning great art—whether through engaging with the great works of literature or writing polished sentences themselves. Instead, it seems that many literary agents, with their misplaced modifiers, comma splices, and disregard for parallelism, could not pass a basic grammar exam—nor could they hold a conversation about literature.

To avoid shutting out many talented undiscovered authors, we must urgently institute higher standards for the literary agent profession, perhaps by implementing higher financial incentives to entice more erudite members of our society to jump in. But until we can do so, one thing remains clear—the literary gatekeepers must be gatekept.

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