Do we like James Patterson?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record and a lot of real giving, held back by one badly judged 2022 remark and a co-author list critics found narrow.
Patterson is a Newburgh, New York kid, born in 1947, who went into advertising as a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson in 1971 and rose to run its North American arm. He quit in 1996 to write full time, and his ad-man instincts showed when he ran a TV campaign for 1993’s Along Came a Spider, the book that launched Alex Cross. He now holds the Guinness record for most New York Times bestsellers.
The stain on his record came in June 2022. He told The Sunday Times that white male writers struggling to get work was “just another form of racism”, then apologised on Twitter within days. He said he does not believe racism is practised against white writers and that he backs diverse voices being heard. Plenty of people thought the original comment was out of touch, and the apology quick but late.
Harm check: that remark is the only mark of its kind we found. A columnist at NBC News Think, Jeff Yang, argued his co-author list doesn’t match his stated support for diverse voices, counting just one woman of colour among 44 collaborators. On politics, Patterson called himself a left-leaning independent, said he wasn’t a fan of Trump’s administration, and called stolen-election claims “the game that President Trump plays”. We found nothing from him against LGBTQ+ or trans people, and nothing on climate either way.
The recent news is a bit of a sideshow. In May 2026 five publishers and author Scott Turow sued Meta and Mark Zuckerberg in a Manhattan federal court, alleging Meta used copyrighted books to train its AI. Patterson isn’t a named plaintiff; his books are among those published by the companies suing, and Meta says it will fight the case. Nothing else new and nasty turned up on him lately.
The good stuff is the real stuff. Since 2015 he has run the Patterson Pledge with Scholastic, handing teachers $500 grants and lifting the pot to $2 million by 2018. He also gave $250,000 in holiday bonuses to booksellers, between $1,000 and $5,000 each, and put $1 million into independent bookshops. That’s money aimed at literacy rather than at his own brand.
So where do we land? On the harm test it’s a pass with an asterisk, because of one 2022 comment he apologised for, and it has not been followed by a pattern of more of the same in what we found. On the good-person test it’s a clean pass. The ghostwriter-style co-author model draws grumbles from critics, but that’s a publishing-industry argument, not a character one.