Where are the Conservative Novelists?

That's the question the National Review recently asked.

From the piece...

In fact, although the image of the writer as rebel has been popular at least since the Romantic period, great writers through history often do not fit that mold. Think of, say, Sophocles and Dante, both of whom gave voice to timeless conservative values: reverence for tradition, skepticism about sudden or drastic change, and insistence on personal accountability.

Nor does the canon of American novelists tilt relentlessly leftward. Modern conservatives will find much that is congenial in writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, John Dos Passos, Walker Percy, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, and John Updike.

On the other hand, conservatives are noticeably rare among our current crop of literary novelists. The two names that jump to mind are Tom Wolfe and Marilynne Robinson. Both have created fictions that show an abiding respect for entrenched moralities. Then, too, we have their nonfiction: Wolfe has written scathingly about the knee-jerk radicalism of Manhattan elites; Robinson, about the smug secularism of academics. Christopher Buckley is another possibility — though not the slam dunk the Buckley name would suggest. None of the three, it must be noted, is a spring chicken. (Neither am I; plus, I’m obscure.) The current ratio of left-of-center to right-of-center literary novelists, in short, looks at least as lopsided as the ratio of left-of-center to right-of-center faculty members at an average liberal-arts college.