Leslie A. Fiedler (1917–2003) was an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. He was in practical terms one of the early postmodernist critics working across literature in general, from around 1970. His most cited work is probably Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).

Life

He was born in Newark, New Jersey, and studied at New York University. He received a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1941.

He taught at the University of Montana from 1941, and the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1956.

Nobel prize winner Saul Bellow once said that "Leslie Fiedler is the worst fucking thing that ever happened to American literature."

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From The Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, March 8, 2005:

It's the birthday of the literary critic Leslie Fiedler, born in Newark, New Jersey (1917). He's best known for his book Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). He believed that the great theme of American literature was the search for identity. He said, "Americans have no real identity. We're all... uprooted people who come from elsewhere."

Fiedler spent most of his life struggling with his own identity. His father was a pharmacist and an atheist. Fiedler went to Hebrew school behind his father's back, but he said, "I stubbornly resisted learning Hebrew—spending most of my lesson time haranguing the rabbi... trying to explain to him why all religions were the opium of the people. To all of this he would retort only that I read Hebrew like a Cossack, which was, alas, true."

During his teens, he wanted to be a Marxist revolutionary, but he eventually lost his idealism. During World War II, he served as an interrogator of Japanese prisoners of War, and before the war was over, he felt closer to many of the Japanese prisoners than he was to most of his fellow soldiers.

When he got back to the states, he studied literature and began writing fiction. His stories were usually rejected from magazines, but the editors started asking him to write book reviews, and that's how he became a critic. He made a name for himself in the academic world when he wrote the hugely controversial 1948 essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" in which he argued that Huckleberry Finn and Jim the slave were in love with each other. Fiedler was one of the first American critics to argue in favor of popular culture. He loved comic books and horror movies and soap operas, and he once said that the only writer of the late 20th century who would be remembered was Stephen King.

Though he made his living for most of his life as a professor of literature, he said, "I never had any interest, really, in being a teacher... It's a mistake to teach literature at all, I think: the student doesn't have a sense of discovery about it. You have to teach it as if you weren't teaching it."

He died in 2003. His last book was Tyranny of the Normal: Essays on Bioethics, Theology & Myth (1996).

Works

• An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (1955)
• Whitman (1959) editor
• The Jew in the American Novel (1959) Herzl Institute pamphlet,
• Love and Death in the American Novel (1960)
• Nude Croquet (1960) stories, with others
• The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1962) with R .P. Blackmur , Northrop Frye, Edward Hubler , Stephen Spender, Oscar Wilde
• Pull Down Vanity (1962) stories
• The Second Stone (1963) novel
• A Literary Guide to Seduction (1963) with Robert Meister,
• The Continuing Debate: Essays on Education for Freshmen (1964) with Jacob Vinocur
• Waiting for the End: The American Literary Scene from Hemingway to Baldwin (1964)
• Back to China (1965) novel
• The Last Jew in America (1966) stories
• The Return of the Vanishing American (1968)
• O Brave New World American Literature from 1600 – 1840 (1968) editor with Arthur Zeigar
• Being Busted (1969)
• Nude Croquet: The Stories (1969)
• The Art of the Essay (1969) editor
• No! In Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature (1971)
• Cross the Border — Close the Gap (1972),
• Unfinished Business (1972) essays
• Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler (1972)
• To the Gentiles (1972)
• The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972),
• Beyond The Looking Glass: Extraordinary Works of Fairy Tale and Fantasy (1973) editor, with Jonathan Cott
• The Messengers Will Come No More (1974)
• In Dreams Awake (1975) editor, anthology of science fiction
• A Fiedler Reader (1977)
• The Inadvertent Epic: From Uncle Tom's Cabin to Roots (1978) Massey Lecture
• Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978)
• Opening Up the Canon. (1981) English Institute papers, editor with Houston A. Baker Jr.
• What was literature?: Class Culture And Mass Society (1982)
• Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (1982)
• Olaf Stapledon : A Man Divided (1983)
• Fiedler on the Roof : Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (1991),
• The Tyranny of the Normal : Essays on Bioethics, Theology & Myth (1996).
• A New Fiedler Reader (1999)

References

• Mark Roydon Winchell (1985) Leslie Fiedler
• S. G. Kellman and I. Malin, editors (1999) Leslie Fiedler and American Culture
• Mark Roydon Winchell (2002) "Too Good to Be True": The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler