Lad lit: History and Key Facts

Lad lit was a term used principally from the 1990s to the early 2010s to describe male-authored popular novels about young men and their emotional and personal lives.

Emerging as part of Britain's 1990s media-driven lad subculture, the term lad lit preceded chick lit. Books categorised as lad lit from UK authors Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons enjoyed both critical and commercial success. Later, in the 2000s, the term lad lit was subsumed, on both sides of the Atlantic, as a male-oriented sub-category of the then massively popular chick lit genre. Though there was heavy investment by some publishers in the sub-category, this later iteration of lad lit had much more limited success among writers, critics and readers.

The term combines the word "lad," which refers to a boy or young man and "lit," which is short for "literature." Books described as lad lit are usually characterized by a confessional and humorous writing style.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Lad lit by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.