Aggressive, cocksure, intellectually sadistic, dogmatic, gossipy, and more keenly involved with contemporary America than probably any of his critical peers, Professor Leslie Fiedler … has written [Waiting for the End], a justly bitter book that withholds neither his derisive intelligence nor his superior independence. Misleadingly subtitled "a new work on the crisis in American culture, race and sex," and sub-subtitled "a portrait of 20th-century American literature and its writ...

Leslie Fiedler is one of those literary personalities who has the effect of polarizing his readers. Already his new study of American Western mythology [The Return of the Vanishing American] has agitated the spleen of Kenneth Rexroth, who resents a New York Jew's tampering with the Western myth [see excerpt above]. Whether such romantic antagonism is just (Fiedler lived for many years in Missoula, Montana) isn't important, but it does present the kind of difficulty such a study as this must fa...

[The Stranger in Shakespeare] can be read in two quite distinct ways. The book may be regarded as epiphenomenal, an outgrowth of his previous theories, assumptions and fixations about American literature, extended back into the Elizabethan past. In other words, it might serve as little more than a rag with which to wipe the ankles of our greatest literary monument. On the other hand, it could be read as the author's most important critical statement, a bold book about the boldest of artists, in which...

Leslie Fiedler, a man of learning and intelligence, has composed another of those fascinating catastrophes with which our literary scholarship is strewn. Love and Death in the American Novel seems to me destined to become a classical instance of sophisticated crankiness; it rides a one-track thesis about American literature through 600 pages of assertion, never relenting into doubt by qualification, and simply ignoring those writers and books that might call the thesis into question. "Our great novel...

Leslie Fiedler's The Last Jew in America (1966), the first [and title novella] of three novellas in a single collection, is set in the small Western college town of Lewis and Clark City, Montana. But the story, in the tradition of the oft-touted (and occasionally scorned) college novel goes beyond narrow academic concerns. It deals with the efforts of one Jacob Moscowitz … to bring together those Jews in the community … in order to reawaken whatever sense of Jewish identity still remain...

One cannot help asking just whom Fiedler was trying to put on when he wrote ["Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey"]—just as the same question needs to be asked with each ensuing volume of his studies in "literary anthropology," as Fiedler has frequently referred to his work. There has always been an element of absurdity or shock in Fiedler's work, and at times it is impossible not to wonder if Fiedler takes his own work seriously. (p. 133) Reading over Fi...

If Leslie Fiedler cannot seem to get his mind off the image of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook sitting night after night over their domestic campfires amidst James Fenimore Cooper's undefiled forests, that fixation undoubtedly would demonstrate to him the validity of his mythical-archetypal criticism, not his tendency to repeat himself, which he does. Archetypes, after all, are supposed to stick like chewing gum on the unconscious. Is it so surprising then that this Sacred Marriage of American Males ke...

The most controversial of all the American Myth Critics, and the most important, is Leslie Fiedler …, whose first book, An End to Innocence, Essays on Culture and Politics (1955), was not actually concerned with literary criticism. Two of the pieces, however, did introduce the theories which eventually become the dogma of No! In Thunder (1960), his second collection of previously published essays; Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), his monumental, seminal, sometimes brilliant, sometimes sop...

Leslie Fiedler, suggests his publisher, "can no longer be called 'the wild man of American literary criticism,'" but no alternative is suggested. Steeped to the follicles all their working hours in a semantic aether devoid of sticks and stones where only names can hurt you, publishers are understandably sensitive about such tags, but Mr. Fiedler presumably isn't…. He has never hallooed in the wilderness nor painted his torso blue, he continues not to be plugged in t...

Fiedler has long been a lone ranger in those marches where academic respectability merges into individual guru-mongering and self-promotion. And it has been a specialised pleasure to watch the ways in which he handled this dual personality, getting himself skilfully into just the right amount of trouble and ducking back into professional decorum. The respectable academic claims to be amusedly outraged; but he draws secret nutriment from the open lawlessness of one clearly of his own tribe. We cannot quite b...

[Fiedler] is nothing if not brilliant, even at the cost of adopting postures that betray and attitudes that pall. His enormous knowingness about literature and patent intelligence are laid waste, it seems to me, by the stance to which he has of late given himself. His prose, in which the phrase now invariably goes beyond the content, is more vehement than virulent, needlessly vehement at times because excessive to the subject, and better adapted to the sheer display of superficially "daring" n...

The first of the linked essays that make up What Was Literature? is called "Who Was Leslie A. Fiedler?" The answer to that question is the key to responding to the book title's question. Leslie A. Fiedler, as Leslie (now no middle initial) Fiedler tells us, was a literary critic who, for all his reputation as a rowdy, iconoclast, and clown, nevertheless proceeded from a principle dear to the academy with which he seemed to be in combat. This was the assumption that the amount of writing...

[In Love and Death in the American Novel, Professor Leslie Fiedler] is not content with one or two or even a handful of his country's novelists; he embraces them all—or all that he considers of value—and relates them to his overriding theme. And, for good measure, he adds to them the Provençal poets, Samuel Richardson, "Monk" Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, Rousseau, Goethe, and several more. He has written a long book. Nor is he content with a scholarly audience; he reach...

For a decade or so Leslie Fiedler has been a kind of wild man of American literary criticism. Although there have been useful insights in the essays he has written, he has repeatedly gone further than he could hope to take his readers with him. It has been clear, indeed, that he hasn't wanted to take them with him; he has wanted to give them a kick in the pants. Now he has written a book, a huge book, called "Love and Death in the American Novel" …, and, happily, it turns out to ...

In a trilogy of critical works, "Love and Death in the American Novel," "Waiting for the End," and now "The Return of the Vanishing American," Leslie Fiedler has been developing the thesis that … American culture is reverting to a savage, or at best barbarous state, which is simply a modernization of the state of affairs that existed before Columbus. This is an amusing thesis, and it is easy to marshal facts and quotations to produce at least "a willin...

There is something haunting and magical about Leslie Fiedler's criticism. We are, of course, familiar with the general outlines: its relentless probing into our culture's deepest dreams, its teasing mixture of bookish learning and urban horse sense, its sheer passion. What continues to fascinate us, though, is the uneasy feeling that we may have become better readers of Love and Death in the American Novel than we have of American novels. After all, Jim never says "Come back to the raft...

Leslie Fiedler is, of course, better known as a critic than as a writer of fiction, and criticism has in fact been the more congenial medium for the exercise of his most engaging qualities of fictional invention. He is preeminently a novelist of ideas, using fiction to illustrate the ideas with a cartoon-like simplicity and, sometimes, vividness. The four volumes of fiction he published in the early and mid-1960's deal with the social, cultural and political issues that characteristically occupied in...

Leslie Fiedler takes his title [No! In Thunder] from a comment Melville made about Hawthorne: "There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say Yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are the travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpetbag—that is to say, the Ego." That is a stirring declaration, and probably it is true of the greatest art. I...

[Mr. Fiedler is a] dedicated and insistent "nay-sayer," [and] the very title of his present collection of essays [No! In Thunder] … tells us that he is embarking on a voyage of destruction; that he is intent on demolishing the "household gods" of both popular ignorance and the academic credo of the "new critics." The material in the present volume covers an almost fantastic range of interests: from Hamlet to Jack Kerouac; from Oedipus Rex to the Leopold-Loeb ...

Freaks: What a compendium! It is almost an encyclopedia. Fiedler admits that research assistants helped him gather this mountain of anecdote, fact, rumor, hearsay, literary allusion, and superstition, and I can well believe it. Producing the book was a task beyond one man's industry. Freaks looks at everything, in every direction: into the mythic past, which supplies us with the monsters and dwarfs and giants of our childhood psychic terrors; into history; and into literature…. [One] of the ad...

Readers of Leslie Fiedler's writings in the little magazines during the past half decade or so may well have wondered whether this brilliant young writer would make his book-length debut in fiction, poetry or the essay, for his lively talent encompasses all these genres. As it happens, this first book ["An End to Innocence"] is a collection of essays, yet its abundant variety draws upon a sensibility at home in all the literary forms. Here are political analyses, travel reportage, liter...

Middle aged, and having to his credit a substantial body of publications, Leslie Fiedler can no longer lay claim to the title of enfant terrible of American letters. After all as the dust jacket of his new novel somewhat smugly notes, Love and Death in the American Novel "is now being taught by the same people who were originally outraged by it." Yet even if he has moved perilously close to membership in the literary establishment Fiedler has shown little evidence of losing his refreshing tale...

In a somewhat rambling series of essays [What Was Literature?: Class Culture and Mass Society]—partly analytical, partly polemical, and partly autobiographical—Fiedler argues that traditional approaches to and standards of literature have become obsolete. Suggesting that a criticism which ignores or condescends to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Longfellow, Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, soap operas, Roots, et alia can have little to say about American culture. Fiedler tries to sweep the dec...