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From elementary school into adulthood, boys and men read less, and less well, than girls and women. Fourth- and eighth-grade boys are roughly a year (10 points on the NAEP reading test) behind their female classmates in reading.
Maybe the books being published and taught in schools simply aren’t appealing to men and boys. Editors who review manuscripts are naturally biased toward books that suit their own tastes, and only 29% of people working in publishing are men.
The same applies to the teachers who pick reading materials for the classroom. Elementary- and secondary-school faculties have long been overwhelmingly female, and the proportion of male teachers just keeps dropping; it has shrunk from 30 to 23% since 1988. And while English professors are 45% men, they’re likely within a rounding error of 100% feminist. In fact, university departments of literature are a major source of the man-bashing narrative.
College teachers of literature seem more eager to paint the “hardboiled masculinities” of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner as unhealthy coping mechanisms than to value those authors for their natural appeal to male readers and their subtle treatment of “gendered” issues. Consider just three examples from these great American writers.
“Hills Like White Elephants” by the reputedly misogynist Hemingway is, among other things, an intricate and damning exposure of men’s responsibility for abortion. And in Faulkner’s “Go Down Moses,” the life trajectory of Isaac McCaslin is, again among other things, an extended meditation on the complicated relationship between a man’s ambition, his moral choices, and his chances of sexual satisfaction. In other words, it’s a story that would be very relatable for incels. And Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” is a master class in the limitations of a life of resentment.
But instead of classics that would have any appeal to men, the works taught in our colleges have been selected according to the principles of “feminist pedagogy in higher education.” Women’s wellbeing has been the focus, while men, their interests, their needs, and their potential have been treated with aggressive neglect, or even active enmity.
Ironically, the man-bashers seem to have conjured up the very thing they were afraid of. The instances of male hostility toward women that we now, unfortunately, do see in podcasts and on social media are pretty clearly in reaction against 50 years of hating on men as selfish, oppressive, and violent; portraying them as bumbling idiots in entertainment and advertising; making them the big losers in divorce; catering to girls’ interests and lavishing disproportionate attention on them in the education system, to the detriment of boys; and “fighting the patriarchy” and “breaking the glass ceiling” with affirmative action that locked many men out of jobs and, as Helen Andrews points out, has sentenced others to work in HR-ified offices reminiscent of Montessori kindergartens.
The affirmative-action regime, together with the decades-long taboo against mentioning any unflattering facts about racial and ethnic minorities, is ginning up some other ugly things in tandem with misogyny. A not insignificant number of young white males are flirting not only with hostility to women but also with racism and antisemitism.
Which is why my heart sank when I first saw Kruger’s Korps: A World War II Thriller, the newest work of fiction by my old boss and long-time friend Harry Crocker (H. W. Crocker III to the reading public). Harry and I see eye to eye on most things, but I think he’s soft on the Confederacy. (In my humble opinion that’s a blind spot attributable to his having grown up in California, while I was born into the Jim Crow South, where it was pretty much impossible to miss the long shadow of my ancestors’ sins).
Oh boy, I thought, looking at the title and author’s name in Nazi blackletter font on the cover of Kruger’s Korps. An adventure story with Nazi heroes. That’s exactly what we don’t need, just when young men on the right are falling prey to conspiracy theories about the Jews.
But I was wronging Harry. I don’t want to spoil any part of the intricate plot of Kruger Korps. Suffice it to say, it’s clear to the reader by page seven that the Nazis of Afrika Korps are not going to be the heroes of the story. Quite the contrary. This is a quintessentially American adventure that transports the reader back to the can-do optimism of the World War II era — a time that feels like a different age of the world, though it’s actually within living memory. Here’s to hoping that lots of demoralized Nazi-curious young men who don’t remember America before we were losing an endless succession of “forever wars” get pulled in by the cover and find themselves swept up in this healthy American story.
Young white men today have plenty of excuse for resentment, but living on resentment and excuses is the road to misery. The eponymous hero of Kruger’s Korps models the opposite path: pursuing his patriotic ideals by tackling every impossible challenge with infinite resource and sagacity.
But the book doesn’t just teach; it also delights. The absurd obstacle course our hero dives and jumps his way through is a thrill a minute. The historical references are a hoot: What missionary priest do we meet in the interior of Africa? Rad trads will guess the answer. And the prose is also a lot of fun. Harry Crocker is always a clever writer, but he outdoes himself here:
“So,” I said to Steiner, “that’s the cause of all this. At least Dr. Faustus traded his soul for his every ambition, but to trade your soul for what—that woman, opium?”
“People make bad choices all the time, lieutenant—trading paradise for a rotten apple, becoming a pillar of salt to satisfy curiosity, betraying the Son of Man for 30 pieces of silver. Have you not read that book?”
Kruger’s Korps is exactly what we need more of — and apparently are going to get. Because Harry Crocker isn’t the only Regnery alumnus working to fill the gap left by the feminized publishing houses and the feminist professors. In fact all three of us who were senior editors at Regnery when I was there are now doing our bit for fiction that appeals to men and boys. That’s a switch from the kind of books we edited at the venerable conservative publisher, which since its foundation in 1947 has published almost exclusively conservative non-fiction. But we’re all working from the premise that “the social imaginary,” as Daily Wire host Andrew Klavan frequently points out, is shaped by the stories we read and watch.
The third senior editor from my time at Regnery, who before that was a veteran science-fiction editor, is Tony Daniel, who is now the founding publisher of the brand-new Ark Press, an imprint of Passage Publishing devoted to putting out the kind of genre literature that appeals to male readers — but not to the East Coast women who dominate American publishing. The graphic-novel version of “American Paladin” by bestselling urban fantasy author Larry Correia launched the imprint in December of last year; Ark will publish the hardcover on June 23. Other recent and upcoming titles from the new imprint include “Red State Mars” by Travis Corcoran; “The Timerman,” set in a 25th century Yukon Confederacy with no electricity or computers; and the comic spy novel “The Pickle Factory: A Tall Tale of the CIA” by first-time author Sam Oyken, about which I keep hearing raves from every editor who worked on it. Ark is committed to discovering and fostering new authors with significant prize money.
And I’m doing my part, working to get out the word about the classics of the old literary canon that have been despised and neglected precisely because they appeal to men — in lectures featuring Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” Faulkner’s “The Bear,” and J. D. Salinger’s “For Esmé, with Love and Squalor.”
This Father’s Day, your gift — whether it’s a classic or a just-published book — can be an enthusiastic vote for the revival of a cultured, healthy, and successful masculinity.
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Elizabeth Kantor is a freelance book editor and the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature.”
