This remorseless explorer of national myths, especially the romance of the West, was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a pharmacist, Jacob J. Fiedler, and Lillian Rosenstrauch Fiedler. He was educated in Newark's public schools and then commuted to New York University, which granted him a bachelor's degree in 1938. Fiedler received a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin the following year and his doctorate from the same institution in 1941. During World War II, he studied at the Japanese Language School at the University of Colorado; and until 1945, Lieutenant Fiedler served in the U.S. Naval Reserve as a Japanese interpreter. He did postdoctoral work at Harvard in 1946 and 1947. Fiedler's marriage to Margaret Ann Shipley ended in divorce after thirty-four years in 1973, when he married Sally Andersen. He has six children from his first marriage and two stepchildren from his second.
Unofficial membership in the New York Jewish intelligentsia did not lapse, even though, for two decades (1941-1943, 1947-1964), Fiedler taught English at Montana State University. Such displacement undoubtedly stirred his interest in the consequences of ethnicity and marginality and in the complications of cultural estrangement.
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