A short life of the author
B.R. Myers (born Brian Reynolds Myers, 1963) is an American literary critic and North Korea scholar whose polemical essay A Reader’s Manifesto — first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 2001 and expanded into a book the following year — became one of the most contentious interventions in American literary culture at the turn of the century. Myers argued that the most celebrated contemporary American novelists — including Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Paul Auster, and David Guterson — were producing prose that was pretentious, poorly written, and rewarded by a critical establishment that had lost the ability to distinguish genuine literary achievement from self-conscious obscurity.
Background
Myers was born in New Jersey, the son of a U.S. Army officer who served as a chaplain in South Korea. He grew up partly in Europe and South Africa, became fluent in multiple languages — including German, Korean, Afrikaans, and Russian — and pursued his academic training at the Ruhr University in Bochum and the University of Tübingen, where he completed a doctorate in Korean studies. He has taught at Korea University and, since 2005, at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea.
His unusual background — an American polyglot living in South Korea, trained in German academic traditions, and deeply read in both Western and East Asian literatures — gives his literary criticism a comparative perspective that is rare among American commentators.
A Reader’s Manifesto (2001/2002)
The essay that made Myers famous began as a self-published pamphlet called Gorgons in the Pool (1999), in which he expressed his frustration with what he saw as the degradation of American literary prose. The Atlantic Monthly contracted a shortened version, which was published in the summer of 2001 and immediately provoked intense debate.
Myers’s central argument was that America’s most lauded literary novelists had abandoned the fundamental obligations of fiction — clear prose, coherent narrative, genuine characterisation — in favour of stylistic affectation designed to signal seriousness. He subjected passages from McCarthy, DeLillo, Proulx, Auster, and Guterson to close reading and found them wanting: McCarthy’s prose was syntactically grandiose but semantically empty, Proulx’s metaphors were bizarre and unearned, DeLillo’s dialogue was portentous without being meaningful, and Auster’s narratives mistook thinness for profundity.
The expanded book version, A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose (2002, Melville House), added rebuttals to his critics and extended his analysis. The book was widely reviewed and became a touchstone in debates about literary standards, the role of critics, and whether the American literary establishment had become an echo chamber.
What made the manifesto genuinely dangerous — rather than merely cranky — was that Myers could write. His prose was precise, witty, and well-supported by textual evidence. He was not arguing from philistinism but from a deep familiarity with literary traditions in multiple languages, which allowed him to demonstrate that what passed for difficulty and depth in contemporary American fiction was often just carelessness.
North Korea Scholarship
Myers’s other major body of work concerns North Korean ideology, propaganda, and literature. His doctoral dissertation became Han Sŏrya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK (1994, Cornell), a study of the most important writer in North Korean literary history and the regime’s unsuccessful attempt to impose Soviet-style socialist realism on its cultural output.
The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (2010, Melville House) is Myers’s most important contribution to North Korean studies. The book argues that North Korean ideology is not, as commonly assumed, a variant of Marxism-Leninism, but rather an ultranationalist racial ideology that portrays the Korean people as an inherently pure and childlike race requiring the protection of a parental leader. Myers traces this ideology not to Communist sources but to Japanese fascist propaganda of the colonial period, arguing that the regime’s founding mythology is essentially a Korean adaptation of Japanese imperial ideology.
The book was controversial among North Korea scholars — some, particularly those sympathetic to the regime’s claim of being socialist, objected to Myers’s characterisation — but it has become widely influential and is now standard reading in North Korean studies courses.
North Korea’s Juche Myth (2015) extends this argument, contending that the juche (self-reliance) ideology commonly attributed to Kim Il-sung was a retroactive invention designed to differentiate North Korean ideology from Soviet Marxism-Leninism without acknowledging its true roots in Japanese fascism.
Critical Method
What links Myers’s literary criticism and his North Korea scholarship is a shared method: close reading of texts that others accept at face value. In both domains, Myers insists on examining what the words actually say rather than what commentators assume they mean. His literary criticism reads celebrated novels as texts rather than reputations; his North Korea scholarship reads propaganda as ideology rather than noise.
Critical Standing
Myers remains a polarising figure. His literary criticism was dismissed by some as contrarian attention-seeking, but it articulated a dissatisfaction with contemporary American fiction that many readers shared but few critics dared express. His North Korea scholarship has been more uniformly well-received, though it remains controversial in academic circles where the regime is studied through a Marxist or liberal internationalist lens.
He is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and publishes regularly in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.