by DAN SINYKIN

I wanted to be a great novelist. I pictured myself at the podium delivering my acceptance speech for the National Book Award. “I’m shocked,” I’d say in a fantasy predicting my triumph. “Sit down, please, sit down. Oh, stop.” In the real world, I woke early every morning to write self-indulgent stories inspired by Thomas Pynchon that no one published. It only took a decade for me to give up. But even now, a goblin perches on my shoulder, whispering that I should try again, giving me perverse hope.

Me and everyone else. So many of us want to be great writers. Students clamor to take creative writing classes. MFA programs have proliferated. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people self-publish fiction online each year through Kindle Direct Publishing and fan fiction sites and Wattpad. Many compete to entice literary agents on Twitter. But vanishingly few become the kind of writer who achieves conventional success and wins lucrative literary prizes.

The game is rigged. It is rigged like capitalism is rigged. There is no puppet master, no conspiracy, only a field where advantages, to begin with, are distributed unequally. You can beat the long odds, but you have long odds to beat; a team of scholars has been working for almost 10 years to detail exactly how the rigging works. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, later joined by Claire Grossman, began by noticing that poetry readings they regularly attended were held in “mainly white rooms.” They wanted to know why. To find out, they would need to widen their purview. The wider they went, the hungrier they became to understand who gets to succeed as a writer in the United States today. They wanted to reveal the system, to see all of it.

So, they collected data. Because prizes are a normative standard for success, they collected data on prizes — every prize since 1918 worth $10,000 or more in 2022 dollars. They recorded who won, what their gender and race were, where they earned their degrees, and who served as judges. Then they published what they found in a series of essays. What did they find?

They found that writers “with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.” They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine.” Iowa has special clout: its alumni “are 49 times more likely to win compared to writers who earned their MFA at any other program since 2000.”

They found that “in recent years, about a quarter of the titles that won prizes were published by […] imprints of Penguin Random House; about half were published by an additional four presses: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (an imprint of Macmillan), Copper Canyon, Graywolf, and HarperCollins.”

They found that race is more complicated than they initially thought. Prizes were — for long stretches exclusively — white throughout the 20th century. But that has changed in recent years: “From 2000 to 2018, 33 percent of prizewinners identified as other than white, coming close to the 36 percent of the population who did in the 2010 census.” (Publishers did not keep up; their lists remained far whiter.) But nonwhite writers needed elite credentials more than white ones. Black writers who won prizes, for example, were much more likely than white writers to hold Ivy League degrees and MFAs.

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