The Rise: Back in the early 2010s, Boomer literature, a new genre was born. It was seen as a pendant to YA literature. Many authors got excited, expecting a bright future for it, at least as good as YA, which was then all the rage. The difference with YA, they thought, was a simple matter of stages in life: just as YA is concerned with coming of age issues, boomer lit or Baby Boomer novels (BB novels) address “coming of old age”…but this was meant with a twinkle in our baby boomer eye. Indeed, Boomer lit was not supposed to be either boring or tragic. 

No, boomers viewed themselves as an active, dynamic lot quite capable, thank you, to handle their third slice of life as a chance to do more amazing things, change the world around them, and above all, change the way humanity addresses aging.

Literature, of course, had to play a role here as it did in all other stages of life: For people like me — aspiring authors and avid readers —it was obviously always meant to accompany this transition, meeting the new demands and needs, featuring characters with whom boomers could identify.

At the turn of the millennium, there were already early successful examples of Boomer Lit, notably David Lodge’s Therapy and Louis Begley’s About Schmidt series. The latter inspired a hilarious film made in 2002 starring an unforgettable Jack Nicholson. This was followed by a series of films aimed at a “mature” audience, including RED and The King’s Speech.  

In 2012, Deborah Moggach‘s book These Foolish Things became a box office hit under the nameThe Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, featuring, inter alia, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. 

Another recent film that was both a hit and that I considered back then a quintessential boomer movie was The Descendants with George Clooney. There is little doubt that Hollywood was then riding the tsunami in popular culture raised by Baby Boomers as they pass the 50+ age mark – all of them by 2014. 

Just as boomers were the foundation of the success of Young Adult (YA) Literature in the 1960s and 70s, I fully expected they would be behind the rising success of boomer lit. There was – and still is, now that I’m writing in 2026 – a good reason for this: It is a genre that addresses a huge and growing market, that is, if demographics count for anything.

Baby Boomers (technically defined as those born between 1946 and 1964) are some 77.5 million in the US alone and they’re hitting retirement age at the rate of 3.5 million/year: that’s 10,000 boomers every day! And of course, the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is a boomer. More about that later.

The same was happening elsewhere in the world. A splashy report published by the United Nations Population Fund  predicted a radical and unprecedented aging of the world population in the 21st century. It pointed to exciting data: By 2015, every second around the world, two people were celebrating their sixtieth birthday, and one in nine was aged 60 years or over. By 2050, one in five people would be over 60. In short, a fast-aging planet (by the way, the numbers change, but it’s still the case: Seniors are expanding their numbers).

So, some 15 years ago,the idea was born that Boomer lit was a totally new genre; that it was vast, flexible, and could accommodate all kinds of theme-related sub-genres from romance to thrillers and science fiction; that it covered all kinds of literary forms from poetry to novellas and short stories as well as non-fiction, including memoirs and guides especially aimed at Boomers as they face new issues in the “Third Act” of their lives or, if you prefer, their “second adulthood”. 

The Fall: There was a problem, however: Growing old is nothing new. The literature has successfully addressed the topic before. So to justify its name, Boomer lit needed something else, above all, a good answer to the question: What is typical of Boomer lit? What makes it different?

Back then, before the rise of boomer President Donald Trump, MAGA and the extreme right that declared war on “woke” culture, it all seemed clear and simple. The answer to what made Boomer Lit different was one thing above all: Boomer Lit stories feature characters with whom boomers could identify.

That covered a very broad range of literature, from nostalgia pieces that evoke boomers’ younger years to dramas and challenges they face now in the later stages of their lives. And lots of writers felt that’s what they were writing about (not just me with my Crimson Clouds)

Boomer lit could mix nostalgia pieces about one’s early life, say in the 1970s or 80s, with books (fiction and non-fiction) that addressed issues such as: what to do later in life, how to deal with retirement, or revive a dying 30-year marriage, how to relate to one’s growing or grown-up children (heck, what do you tell them?), and of course, above all, how to take care of the elderly.

That mix in itself should have rung alarm bells: Could such a vast range of possible topics be pushed into a single category?

Everyone, back then, felt, yes, it could. Just as YA was, at its core, a coming-of-age story, Boomer Lit, at its core, was about the unique challenges of a “sandwiched generation” between the young and the old.

The argument went something like this: What makes for the wealth and depth of Boomer lit is being caught in the middle, between those at the start of their lives and those at the end.

That’s why baby boomer stories can be told with irony and compassion; they can be comedies or tragedies; they can make you laugh or cry.  But they are always real, profoundly real (or should be, if they are any good). They reflect a lifetime of experience, right?

So, for example, a boomer lit novel about love is likely to be deeper, more nuanced, more complex: it’s (almost always) about romance the second time around, romance between mature adults who know what life is all about, who no longer harbor illusions but who still hold hope for “true love” (whatever that is).

Good reads in Boomer Lit were listed here on this blog and readers were invited to click on the titles that would get them to their Amazon page:

• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach 
• About Schmidt by Louis Begley 
• Therapy by David Lodge
• The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce 
  
• No Place like Home, by Anne R. Allen
• Evil Deeds by Joseph Badal 
• Goodbye Emily by Michael Murphy
• Confessions of an Instinctively Mutinous Baby Boomer by Marsha Roberts
• The Paper Doll Museum by Abigail Padgett
• Rent a Thief by Beate Boeker
• The Warrior with Alzheimer’s by Stephen Woodfin 
• Crimson Clouds by Claude Nougat  (yes, that’s me, with a pen name that I have long abandoned, every since I helped found Impakter magazine and became its Senior Editor, back in 2014; and that book, along with all the others I published under that pen name are NO LONGER AVAILABLE – unpublished)

I also started a thread in the Kindle Forums for authors to list their Boomer novels in September 2012: authors were invited to click here to list their titles; readers were encouraged to check it out for a “good Boomer read”.

Most importantly, I launched a GOODREADS GROUP to discuss Boomer books in October 2012. Here’s the link and it still exists, although the group itself is now dead for all intents and purposes, with no activity and no new members after having reached a peak of over 700 members. But more about that in a minute.

Moderated by fellow authors Abigail Padgett, Marsha Roberts, Libby Fischer Hellman, Shelley Lieber and myself, the group grew at first by leaps and bounds: By its first year, it had some 500 members and 100+ books on its bookshelf, many from New York Times bestselling authors including at least one runner up to the Man Booker Prize (author Rachel Joyce). 

Talk on social media didn’t stop there. There were plenty of articles about Boomer lit around the Net: Readers of this blog were invited to check out the Goodreads Group discussion thread for all the latest news, including, for example, a number of articles though the list was never exhaustive: 

•  Boomer Café
•  The Passive Voice
•  The Kindle Nation Daily
•  Digital Book Today 
•  Indies Unlimited
•  Venture Galleries article
• Venture Galleries interviews: part 1,  The Gathering Storm of Boomer Literature
• Venture Galleries interviews: part 2
• Venture Galleries interviews: part 3 
• Venture Galleries interviews: part 4 
• Gawker Media New Adult vs. Coming of Old Age
• Geezer Guys and Gals: Baby Boomer Novels: A New Genre, the Next Phenomenon in Publishing
• Blog – Find a Good Book to Read 
• Women on Writing: Boomer Lit, Romancing the Middle-Aged Reader
• Publishing Perspectives: Is Baby Boomer Lit the Next Hot Genre? (published March 14, 2013)
• Judy Lee Dunn’s article: The Shot Heard Around the World, Boomer Lit is Here (March 29, 2013)
• The Huffington Post: What are Boomers Reading? Article by Dianne Harman (May 6, 2013)
• Boomer Lit Newest Book Genre, article by Mac McLean in The Bulletin (November 10, 2013): it covers in particular Boomer Lit authors Marsha Roberts and Claude Nougat    

There was also a Boomer Lit Facebook Fan Page, click here a group open to the public. The FB moderators (fellow author Libby Fischer Hellmann and myself) told everyone at the time that we were very serious about Boomer lit: The point of our Facebook page was to provide information about Boomer lit, not to be a self-serving marketing platform.

At present, this page is no longer active (last posting was in 2022 and didn’t concern Boomer Lit)

Readers were also invited to follow BoomerLit on Twitter (now X): @boomerlit  and told to look for the #boomerlit hashtag to find out about new boomer reads, articles, interviews and book trailers. If you click that link, it’s still alive and a question to X about its content brings up the following information:

NOTE about the marketing I used at the time, highlighting that Boomers were “driving the book market, citing, see here, the latest stats on Boomer Lit :

• The 77.3 million Americans who make up this generation also purchased one-fourth of the new books sold in 2011 (Bowker report). 
• More than half of baby boomers have visited a public library in the past year to attend an event, do research on a computer or check out a book. That’s 38 million Americans (Pew survey)
• 16 percent of people ages 50 to 64 owned an e-reader in April 2012 (Pew). 

The Fall: One can date the end of the Boomer Lit boom with the rise of Donald Trump: There is no question that for “woke” people—that is to say, anyone like myself who has a strong moral compass and an instinctive dislike and distrust of political extremism of any kind, whether on the left or right— the association with Donald Trump who is after all, a boomer, is the kiss of death.

Before the fall of Boomer Lit with the rise of MAGA and the war on “woke” culture, I had already noted something worrying regarding the birth of Boomer Lit: I had come to realize (somewhat late in the game) that the concept of Boomer Lit was not born with our Goodreads Group in 2012 or with me. It appeared much earlier, in a Writer’s Digest article in 2008, that mentioned two editors who had seen an opportunity but, for some reason or another, had not been able to follow through with the creation of a dedicated imprint.

There was no actual reason given for this failure in follow-up – possibly the timing was wrong, 2008 was before the demographic boom (see article here)

Boomer Lit, as of this writing (2026), is still awaiting recognition from the publishing industry in the form of an imprint dedicated to it.