Gopnik’s thinking about the Shakespeare painting everyone’s been thinking about all week (cf, Savage’s posts here and here) includes—in addition to rich tangents about balding, Shakespeare’s social circle, Shakespeare’s wife, and another portrait of Shakespeare that emerged in Canada three years ago that no one cares about—this crazy little (and possibly true) observation:

[T]hat Shakespeare was good-looking as a young man, before he lost his hair and puffed out from home-cooking, seems at least likely, on the fixed general principle that writers who become very celebrated in their youth, as he did, are, to a first approximation, almost always good-looking. Byron and Shelley, Mailer and Updike and Salinger, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Tennyson, Lowell, Ted Hughes—all celebrated in their youth, all not just O.K.-looking but an oil painting, each and every one. There are many good funny-looking writers, but it’s hard to think of good funny-looking writers who get famous young. Funny-looking writers, at least funny-looking male writers, get famous late—Samuel Johnson and Sinclair Lewis and John Milton and Philip Larkin all come instantly to mind—or else they don’t get famous. They get read, but they don’t get celebrated. (The only exception is Alexander Pope, who got famous young and was a humpback dwarf, but he was so good that no one noticed, and anyway he looked fine from the neck up.)

The analysis is not applied to female writers, for some reason, maybe because it doesn’t (at least at first blush) seem to hold true for women. Mary Shelley? Iris Murdoch? Flannery O’Connor? Carson McCullers? “That’s not an attractive lineup,” a straight guy in the office just confirmed.

Christopher Frizzelle was The Stranger's print editor, and first joined the staff in 2003. He was the editor-in-chief from 2007 to 2016, and edited the story by Eli Sanders that won a 2012 Pulitzer...

23 replies on “Adam Gopnik on Hot Young White Guys Who Write”

  2. Zadie Smith. So hot. White Teeth was great, but I doubt that either the accent or the looks hurt her on this side of the Atlantic.

  3. You’re nuts. Carson McCullers is gorgeous. I can’t stand her writing, but whoo-ee, that’s a looker. Also: Dorothy Parker? Hott.

  4. Thomas Pynchon was not much of a looker as a youngster, if the, like, three photos of him in existence do not lie. On the other hand, he didn’t hit it big until Gravity’s Rainbow, when he was already 35. So maybe he fits the rule.

  6. Actually, come to think of it, Pynchon published his earlier novel “V” way back when he was 25, and if that wasn’t a best seller, it did win “best young novelist of the year award” or something from the NYT. So by that measure, he really should have looked like David Duchovny, which he didn’t.

  7. Zadie Smith, Jhumpha Lahiri, Colette, Isak Dinesan, Miranda July, Marisha Pessl, Mary Karr, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Edna St. Vincent Millay, …

    If you can call Updike handsome as a young man then any of these women are certainly in the running for beautiful young women…

  10. Let’s not bring Marisha Pessl into this; whole internets have been wasted writing her beauty up, and she’s just not that hot. Nell Freudenberger, however, is completely 100% fucking gorgeous in photos and in person. Oh. My. God.

  15. I say “myth busted.” Too many exceptions.

    Now, the one about the male authors all having hot wives . . . Yep, I’d have to agree with that.

  16. My husband is hot, a writer, and under 30, so apparently, he’s about to become celebrated/famous any day now. He also has a hot wife, which should help.

  22. Paul – agreed on both Nell Freudenberger and Marisha Pessl. But I will not give up on my Updike point – if Updike can be considered a handsome young man then Pessl certainly falls innto the beautiful young woman category. Admittedly, I despise Updike – and in his youth he looked like a particulary smug inbred rabbit -giving birth to the dreariest eponymous series in American literature.

    However – larger point is this – young male writers are allowed “individualistic” good looks -female writers get defined by “hotness.” Not right…

Comments are closed.