The Working Class in Fiction, and the Working Class Author on Park Avenue

Recently writing about the near-invisibility of the working class and its life from literary fiction today James McDonald emphasized the tastes of the literary agents who are the publishing industry's gatekeepers.

These tastes certainly play a part in determining what may reach a publisher and what does not. However, given that McDonald was (rightly) insistent that one need not be working class to write well about the working class (just as, more broadly, people can, do and should transcend their limitations as they write about the world), he was less probably less inclined to emphasize the extent to which working-class persons are by and large not to be found in publishing, the Academy or anywhere else--while, contrary to the hopes endlessly raised about the slush pile by the colossal industry playing on the hopes of aspiring authors, barring a "platform" (i.e. the ability to answer "Yes" to the question "Are you famous enough that a commercially significant number of people will buy a book with your name on the cover?") personal connections are pretty much the only way in. Working-class persons are particularly unlikely to have connections of that kind--and what this means for their exclusion from traditional publishing, if far from the only factor in the invisibility of the working class in literature today, does contribute to it.