For J.K. Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter franchise, the people in the publishing world who compile best-of lists may as well be dementors.
Reader’s Digest recently published a list of the 36 Best Fantasy Book Series. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was not on the list.
Here is Chicago librarian Rachel Strolle’s, who compiled the list, reason why the fantasy genre is popular: “It’s easy to understand the appeal of fantasy book series: Much of the genre provides an outlet through which readers can escape their realities and explore a new one. The best books may see you journeying across Middle-earth with hobbits, finding a gem in the center of a clan war, or even destroying some ghosts — there’s no shortage of magical moments to be found in these pages.”
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Rowling has become well known for opposing transgender “women” from competing in sports against biological females and accessing female spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms. When Glamour magazine recently made nine transgender people “Women of the Year,” Rowling objected, accusing the magazine of “telling girls that men are better women than they are.”
Reader’s Digest isn’t the first publication to blackball Rowling. In 2022, Esquire magazine posted a list of “The 50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time.” At the top is The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Other titles on the list are Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu, and Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi.
The blackballing of Rowling is part of a larger trend in literature to erase conservatives or even writers who aren’t explicitly leftist. Writing recently in Compact, Jacob Savage noted the phenomenon of “the vanishing male white writer.” He traced the decline of “young white men in American letters” by looking at the New York Times‘s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012, the New York Times included seven white American men under the age of 43. In 2013, there were six, and in 2014, there were six. “And then the doors shut,” Savage said.
By 2021, Savage observed, “there was not one white male millennial on the ‘Notable Fiction’ list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men).” There were also “no white male millennials featured in Vulture‘s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair‘s, none in the Atlantic‘s,” he said. Esquire “has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.”
Writing in the New York Times recently, David J. Morris, a creative writing professor, said America has lost its “literary men.” He observed, “Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction bestseller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80% of fiction sales. I see the same pattern in the creative writing program where I’ve taught for eight years. … As Eamon Dolan, a vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, told me recently, ‘the young male novelist is a rare species.’”
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A few science fiction and fantasy authors have been unhappy with Rowling being canceled. “To put Jemisin ahead of Tolkien — while completely omitting J.K. Rowling — is laughable,” said Brad R. Torgersen, a science fiction and fantasy writer whose book A Star-Wheeled Sky won the 2019 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Torgersen added, “Also, where are David Eddings, Tracy Hickman, and Stephen R. Donaldson? Leaving them off the list seems to be an act of willful ignorance.”
Another fantasy author, John C. Wright, also criticized the list. “Number one on the list was not any work by J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. LeGuin, George R.R. Martin, or L. Frank Baum,” he said, “but a work of ‘woke’ by N.K. Jemisin that no fan of fantasy has any interest in reading. Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lord Dunsany, Abraham Merritt, Clarke Ashton Smith, Andre Norton, Jack Vance, were not even mentioned anywhere in what purported to be the best fantasy of all time, nor was William Morris, who invented the genre.”