Opinion | Should Living Be Enough 'Lived Experience' for a Writer? New York Times (Online) John McWhorter This summer, 37 years late, I finally got to Allan Gurganus's magnificent novel “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.” It was a best seller in 1989. But today, Gurganus would probably have trouble finding a publisher for it. You see, Gurganus is a white man and the main character is a woman. And then, let's not even consider that some of the characters he gets into the heads of are … Black. I was blown away by how fully Gurganus embodied a woman who marries a middle-aged Confederate veteran in her teens at the turn of the 20th century and lives into her 90s to tell her story to a young aide at her nursing home. So vividly did Gurganus capture giving birth, same-sex experience between girls, women's sense of fashion and how it changes throughout life and so much else that at times I had to remind myself that this was a man writing. After a while, I stopped doing so. His command of the Black characters was equally authoritative. He especially got behind the eyes of a woman taken to Charleston via the horrific Middle Passage and how she perceived whites on seeing them for the first time, throughout her childhood as a slave, and then living long past the Civil War. Today, however, a fashion among certain influential people is to dismiss it as “problematic” that someone would approach those characters without having had their “lived experience.” Under this analysis Gurganus was being a kind of puppeteer, speaking for characters he couldn't hope to portray as accurately and fully as someone of their sex or race. Accusations of this kind have been standard since the late 2010s. Jeanine Cummins's 2020 novel, “American Dirt,” sold over four million copies and was chosen for Oprah's Book Club amid glowing reviews from many important voices, including the Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros. Suddenly , however, a chorus of detractors dismissed the book as poorly written, especially aggrieved that Cummins was a white woman writing about Mexican immigrants. The major publishers rejected Rebecca Bruff's “Trouble the Water” because she is white and wrote from the perspective of a Black Civil War veteran. In 2018 The Nation published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee written as a statement from a homeless Black narrator. The poem was written with care and empathy, but the predictable response from certain quarters led The Nation to publish an apology for printing it. The Own Voices movement in the late 2010s elevated children's books written by authors sharing the protagonists' identities. Of late, Rachel Reid has been criticized for writing “Heated Rivalry,” a novel about gay male hockey players, when she is obviously not a gay man and has not specified whether she is a gay woman. To the people imposing it, this “lived experience” standard may seem like enlightened thought, getting us past the benightedness of the past. But the very nature of creativity is to step beyond the self, an especially valuable step in a diverse society that promotes empathy? Broadway musicals, for example, are the product of people who created beyond their lived experiences, as the forthcoming book “Broadway in Black and White,” written by the conductor John Mauceri with interpolations by yours truly, describes. The score of “Show Boat” is a vast, plangent and achingly beautiful surge of musical and lyrical creativity, much of it channeling Black spirituals, blues and ragtime music as well as the Black characters' speech patterns and perspective on their lives (“Ol' Man River”). None of this was the “lived experience” of the two white, educated, affluent men who made “Show Boat,” Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. But they created something so powerful that after the first performance, audience members were so stunned that they at first forgot to applaud . Was “Show Boat” cultural appropriation? Yes, indeed. A similar work by a Black artist would almost certainly not have made it to Broadway in 1927. But these days it is much less likely that white artists imitate Black ones and get paid for it while the Black artists languish on the sidelines. Today we can enjoy something we all understand deep down — the glory of what happens when groups of humans share and blend what they are working on. Gurganus has said : “It's extraordinary that it is considered a feat for a male human to actually imagine a female one. Fifty-one percent of human beings on earth are women, right? We've all spent nine months riding around in the belly of one, and yet when it comes to writing I and thinking she — impossibility looms.” He could have said something similar about writing Black characters. Yet according to today's supposed wisdom, Gurganus was behind the curve and should have focused his novels on white gay Southern men only. But what is behind the curve is the “lived experience” idea itself, as if we are being told it's against the gods' wishes for us to step beyond the boundaries of our particular tribal lands. This idea is rooted in the larger battle against the power of whiteness. (When has Black writer been critiqued for writing white characters?) I saw the effects of that battle when a book prize committee I sat on several years ago rejected William Giraldi's “American Audacity” — the essay collection from which I learned about Gurganus's book — and a committee member (white) dismissed it as essentially “what some white guy thinks about books.” But the idea that one should write from only one's own experience is an willfully narrow-minded attack on creativity, empathy and even reason. It is cherished most by a vocal and generally younger minority, to whom the literary world caters out of fear of being called dirty names on social media, as well as mere expedience. Best not to poke the bear, you know. The lived experience notion has certainly elicited pushback . This should continue, increase and ultimately render the whole idea an obsolete curiosity. This needlessly Balkanizing fashion, presented as enlightenment, is simply jejune. The literary world needs to get over it and get back to publishing writers for being the uniquely imaginative and empathetic humans they are.