Profile of Leslie Fiedler on Famous Like Me

Leslie Aaron Fiedler (March 8, 1917–January 29, 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.

His controversial 1948 Partisan Review essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" argued that there was a homosexual relationship between Huckleberry Finn and Jim.

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

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)

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