Funding for arts and culture has always been a mainstay of U.S. philanthropy. One of the most notable examples involved one of the richest people of his time, Andrew Carnegie, devoting unprecedented resources to a literary cause. While Carnegie’s wealth funded a panoply of educational and cultural institutions, perhaps his most famous philanthropic endeavor was his campaign to bolster the public library system in the United States and other English-speaking countries.
By 1929, when Carnegie’s library program shuttered, he had helped fund over 2,500 “Carnegie libraries,” some of them housed in extravagant buildings. The libraries were public-private partnerships; in Carnegie’s preferred formula, the towns and cities where the libraries were built signed off in advance of money from the industrialist, committing themselves to the library’s future funding and maintenance. Carnegie once said that a library “outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never-failing spring in the desert.”
Carnegie’s libraries weren’t without their critics, but it’s indisputable that they remain one of the most significant philanthropic endeavors in U.S. history.
Considering how instrumental Carnegie’s library funding was in establishing a blueprint for future philanthropy, and as a go-to example of megadonor largesse, it’s something of a bitter pill that, today, philanthropic giving for writing and literature is arguably at a historic low. Inside Philanthropy recently published an updated version of our report on funding for writing and literature — a part of our larger State of American Philanthropy project — and the findings were grim. Giving for writing and literature significantly trails philanthropy for other artistic disciplines.
The reasons for this are many. Most obviously, the work of a writer requires fewer material inputs than, say, that of a sculptor or a filmmaker, and therefore doesn’t require the same level of capital investment. Yet even with that in mind, funding is below the baseline needed for a thriving marketplace of writers or an adequate infrastructure to make literature accessible to the public.
Meanwhile, other unfavorable trends pose serious challenges. Consolidation in book publishing led to a business model where fewer authors make money and fewer ideas and literary forms are considered marketable. Smaller presses and literary journals — many of them supported in part by philanthropy — are struggling. At the university level, literature and humanities programs are facing an existential crisis amid budget cuts and declining enrollment. Book bans and censorship are a major concern within K-12 education, postsecondary education, and at public and private libraries.
Trumpian budget cuts have now entered this landscape. Substantial defunding measures at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) are underway. Literature nonprofits that have depended on government grants may increasingly turn to fundraising, including from philanthropy, to maintain operations.
Philanthropy’s key writing and literature supporters
Funding for writing and literature can be classified into three broad categories: (1) grants, residencies and fellowships supporting individual writers; (2) support for nonprofit literary arts organizations and publishers; and (3) support for education organizations or libraries that offer literacy and creative writing programs. Each of these categories can be further divided by programmatic focus — fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, spoken word and playwriting, for example. Today’s top funders include private foundations with arts programs, community foundations that support writing and literature in their home communities, and individual donors.
As mentioned, the amount of money philanthropy devotes to writing and literature is small relative to other artistic disciplines. An Inside Philanthropy analysis of Candid data spanning from 2019 to 2023 shows that the funders included in Candid’s dataset gave $535 million to writing and literature programs in the United States, substantially less than giving to the visual arts ($3.8 billion), music ($8.9 billion), or theater ($6.9 billion) during the same time period. While there are limits to Candid’s data, the disparities here are substantial enough to be telling.
Private foundations are the most influential players in this space, particularly the Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and a handful of smaller foundations that specialize in arts giving, including the Lannan Foundation, Whiting Foundation, Jerome Foundation and Paul M. Angell Family Foundation. Community foundations typically support literature, but usually to a small degree.
In the mold of Carnegie, individual donors also play a major role in arts and literature funding. When a wealthy megadonor gives a large writing/lit gift, it’s especially impactful in this underfunded field.
Back in 2002, Ruth Lilly, heir to the Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical empire, gave a $200 million gift to the Poetry Foundation. Arts supporter Agnes Gund funded writing programs for those impacted by the criminal justice system through her now-shuttered Art for Justice Fund. The author James Patterson is a big literary arts funder. A newer funder to know is the Crankstart Foundation, the philanthropy of venture capitalist Michael Moritz and his spouse, the author Harriet Heyman. And the Hawthornden Foundation recently became an important funder after receiving a substantial boost to its endowment upon the passing of its benefactor, Drue Heinz, the long-time editor of The Paris Review.
Unsurprisingly, another major donor in this space is MacKenzie Scott, who has been giving away her vast fortune with alacrity since 2019. A novelist herself, Scott is one of the few top philanthropists in the U.S. currently funding reading and writing to any significant degree. Literary grants can be found throughout her giving over the past half-decade, but she focused on this in 2021 in particular, when she gave to the Authors League Fund ($5 million), PEN America (amount undisclosed), Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh ($2 million), the East Bay Fund for Artists (amount undisclosed), Room to Read ($25 million), Urban Word NYC, and South Arts, among others. In an arts sector that rarely sees large commitments, these were seismic gifts.
We’ve seen writing and literature funders increasingly prioritize support for diverse artists and those from underinvested communities. Another growing area of interest is fighting book bans and censorship in public schools. Top nonprofit recipients in this area include the Diverse Books for All Coalition, We Need Diverse Books, Unite Against Book Bans, and related programs at PEN America and the American Library Association.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
Funding levels are low despite existential threats
Despite some new funders and growing interest in equity and combating book bans, the pattern of low philanthropic support for writing and literature still holds. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why.
One core reason has a sad irony: Funders often erroneously assume that literature is commercially viable. Publishing houses are big businesses, after all, and writers theoretically benefit from a for-profit marketplace where the fruits of their labor can be sold and consumed.
This has become less true thanks to the consolidation of American publishing houses into the “Big Five” — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan. A small number of authors (many of them celebrity authors working with ghostwriters) make big profits, but the majority of professional literary writers no longer enjoys viable avenues for the distribution of their work, thanks to the decline of small publishers and the book distributors supporting them. The situation is analogous to what’s happened with local journalism. Thousands of local papers providing jobs to local journalists shuttered, while a small number of national outlets thrive.
“Publishing, originally geared toward offering new writers the chance to connect with readers, evermore trends toward an industry narrowly engineered to produce repeat best sellers,” veteran bookseller Richard Howorth wrote in a 2022 New York Times op-ed. As the Big Five publishers prioritize producing more books from bestselling authors, fewer new authors are given a chance. The public is then left with fewer options and less exposure to the full spectrum of the literary arts. “A customer may be left with a book less well made, less appealing, less diverse, more expensive, and whose author makes less money,” Howorth wrote.
Independent presses and literary journals are struggling to survive. The business models of these outlets vary widely: Some are largely supported by subscriptions, earned revenue and event fundraising; some are attached to universities; some rely on government grants; some are funded by foundations or local arts patrons. Examples of such publishers and publications that have attracted sustained philanthropic support include Graywolf Press, Harper’s Magazine Foundation, Milkweed Editions and The New Press.
Another reason for the philanthropic funding gap is that literature may simply be off grantmakers’ radar — even among arts funders. Other arts disciplines, such as film, theater and the visual arts, have a denser network of nonprofits to choose from, often ones that are locally active. Nonprofit literary organizations are generally smaller and less visible within their communities. In an interview with Inside Philanthropy, Ben Cameron, president emeritus of the Jerome Foundation, a Minnesota-based arts funder, noted, “It’s the rare city without a theater and without a museum and without orchestras or choruses. Literature is predominantly an individual pursuit, and many cities don’t have that infrastructure landscape in the same way.”
Funders who gloss over writing and literature, however, are missing out. A little funding goes a long way in this discipline; unlike other forms of artistic expression, creating literature does not require expensive equipment and materials — though it does require the writer to have money to live on while they’re writing, as well as a dedicated space to write in. In the words of Virginia Woolf, it takes “money and a room of her own.” Or, in the words of one foundation leader interviewed by Inside Philanthropy, “the return on your investment is shockingly high in writing.”
With government cuts, literature nonprofits are vulnerable
With many literature nonprofits operating perpetually at the brink of financial crisis, cuts to public funding present an immediate threat. This is obviously true for nonprofits relying heavily on government grants, but any nonprofit with even a small percentage of its revenue coming from public grants would need to quickly make up that money somewhere else.
Literary organizations vary widely in the extent of their reliance on government grants. Federal grants and operating agreements, for example, comprised over 80% of the 2022 annual operating budget for the National Writing Project, which supports writing teachers and programs at K-12 schools. Some literature nonprofits receive grants from state arts councils. Many of these public grants, however, are similar to philanthropic support for literature in general in that they are rare and small.
Federal literature funding cuts are already in progress. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services are three federal agencies that make literary grants. All three are proposed for elimination under the Trump administration’s 2026 Discretionary Budget Request. While these agencies still exist, they have been drastically reduced in recent weeks and months. In late April, hundreds of arts organizations across the U.S. were informed by email that their NEA grants were pulled. In response, a group of senior NEA officials resigned.
Things aren’t any better at the National Endowment for the Humanities. As of this writing, leaders at the NEH were told to expect “reductions in staff of as much as 70 to 80% (of approximately 180 people), as well as what could amount to a cancellation of all grants made under the Biden administration that have not been fully paid out.”
So far, 65% of NEH staff have been laid off, and grants across the U.S. have been abruptly terminated. Nonprofits are already sharing how this impacts their programming. The University of Minnesota’s Ellis Library lost a $500,000 renovation grant. In Connecticut, cuts to the NEH as well as the Institute of Museum and Library Services (ILMS) are having ripple effects across the state, with programs ranging from library services, e-book platforms, summer reading programs and arts festivals suddenly facing an existential struggle. In an interview with New Haven’s Arts Paper, Jason Mancini, executive director of Connecticut Humanities, said that Connecticut arts and humanities organizations stand to lose “between $7.5 and $9 million between the NEA, NEH and ILMS. If the state doesn’t put money into this, we will not exist.”
The extent of philanthropy’s long-term response to federal austerity measures remains to be seen. The cuts are relatively small in terms of gross numbers — arts programs run on shoestring budgets — yet the potential impacts are huge. Private funding could prove powerful here.
Indeed, during an entirely different recent crisis, arts philanthropy made a difference. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, arts funders banded together and created emergency funds for struggling artists, including writers. Artist Relief, funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and more than 20 other funders, provided $23.4 million in emergency grants in 2020 and 2021, an eye-popping number in the world of writing and literature funding.
While many arts philanthropies haven’t yet responded publicly to this new crisis, one sign of life comes from the Mellon Foundation, which, on April 19, announced $15 million in emergency grants to humanities councils in all 50 states. This type of quick thinking and collaboration may prove essential as literary nonprofits — already struggling — face unprecedented challenges.
