Novelist Richard North Patterson defies the publishing world’s stay-in-your-racial-lane dictates

During his career as a writer, Richard North Patterson has sold more than 25 million books. Sixteen of his 22 novels have been New York Times bestsellers, and with good reason. He brings to his fastpaced works of fiction not just a deep knowledge of politics and a former litigator’s legal expertise but extensive research into whatever topic he tackles.

Patterson hasn’t published a novel since 2014. Instead, he had been concentrating on writing political columns for HuffPost, The Boston Globe, and

The Bulwark, as well as a nonfiction book. But after realizing how much of that work concerned race, in 2021 he returned to fiction to address that topic in the uniquely clarifying way a novel allows.

Given his impressive record of sales, one would have thought any publisher would leap at the prospect of bringing out his new novel. That’s particularly true because “Trial,” which I’ve read, is a gripping story, a book that’s hard to put down. Judge for yourself. Patterson has posted several chapters on his Substack.

(Disclosure: Patterson, a friend, gave me a cover blurb for my forthcoming novel.)

And yet when his agents began circulating his latest novel, they were met with polite rejection after polite rejection. Fully 19 publishers or publishing imprints — that, is divisions within a publishing house — took a pass on the latest offering by this repeat bestselling author.

Why?

Because having white authors — particularly white male authors — write from the perspective of protagonists of other races has become a near taboo in today’s publishing world.

Never mind that one of Patterson’s principal Black characters, Allie Hill, a Georgia voting rights activist, has had a son, Malcolm, by his main white character, a Massachusetts congressman. Or that a violent traffic stop encounter between a white deputy sheriff and 18year-old Malcolm, who is working to register Black voters in Georgia, is such a contemporary topic.

As part of his research for the book, Patterson went to rural Georgia and spoke with some 50 residents, many of them Black, about their daily lives and interactions with white authorities. “They trusted me to tell their story in fiction,” Patterson noted to me. Nobody raised his race or questioned whether he could convey their experiences.

Those concerns came from the New York City-based publishing industry.

“Given the demographics of publishing in Manhattan, it is a mortal lock that almost all of the editors who objected to my racial identity were white,” Patterson added. “It is also a virtual certainty that they know nothing firsthand of the issues facing the Black Georgians who spoke to me from their own lived experience. So it is ironic that these people would then imagine themselves as the literary benefactors of Black America.”

Publishing’s stay-in-your-own-raciallane intolerance deeply troubles renowned literary scholar, author, and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“Art has to be open to everyone,” he said in an interview. “The act of imagination cannot be censored.”

The Harvard sage is passionate on that subject. “We simply cannot allow anyone to stand at the gate holding signs that say, ‘White Only’ or ‘Black Only,’ or in this case, ‘No Whites Allowed,’ ” Gates said. “We have done our best to dismantle the perverse logic of Jim Crow, characterized by the fallacious concept of ‘separate but equal.’ We must never allow any form of Jim Crow to be transposed onto the world of literature and art.”

Gates offered this thought experiment: What if he decided to write a book about William Shakespeare or John Milton, only to be told that because he was not of Anglo-Saxon descent, he couldn’t fully enter into the aesthetic experience or intellectually identify with those white authors? People

Having white authors — particularly white male authors — write from the perspective of protagonists of other races has become a near taboo in today’s publishing world.

of good will would recognize that as racism and call it out, he said.

But one can’t defend the right of a Black writer to write about white subjects and “then stand at the gatepost and say, ‘Well, Ric, you’re white, so what do you know about Black people?’ ” said Gates, who is reading “Trial” and finding it “riveting.”

A mutual friend finally found Patterson a willing publishing house in Post Hill Press, where Adam Bellow, executive editor of its conservative imprint, had the reaction one would expect from an enterprising publisher.

“I was like, Richard North Patterson?” Bellow said. “You mean, the guy who wrote 16 New York Times bestsellers? Of course we want to publish him.”

Consider the irony: A conservative editor has taken a chance on a liberal author whose book mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch for fear of a fauxprogressive backlash.

Here’s hoping “Trial” is a big hit. Not because Patterson particularly needs another bestseller, but for this reason: It would send an unmistakable message to the publishing world that mainstream readers have no patience for the illiberal impulse that now threatens broad-ranging and enlightening literary imagination.