Leslie Fiedler

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Fiedler, Leslie A[aron] (1917–2003), professor at State University of New York, Buffalo, whose lively and often very witty literary criticism appears in his works of “literary anthropology,” Love and Death in the American Novel (1960); Waiting for the End (1964), on 20th‐century American literature and culture; and The Return of the Vanishing American (1968), on the Western as genre; The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972); and Collected Essays (1971), often pursuing archetypal myths and making psychic explorations. What Was Literature? (1982) suggests that the popular products of mass society, literary and other, are more important than the high art of sophisticated culture. The Inadvertent Epic (1980) in five essays deals with the epic in relation to American literature, from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Haley's Roots. Olf Stapledon, a Man Divided (1983) studies the literary career of the noted British writer of science fiction. He has written stories, The Last Jew in America (1966) and Nude Croquet (1969), and a novel, The Messengers Will Come No More (1974). Being Busted (1969) deals with his arrest for possession of marijuana, and Freaks (1978) surveys myths about and social responses to physical abnormality.

Leslie Fiedler 1917–2003, American critic, b. Newark, N.J., grad. New York Univ. (B.A. 1938), Univ. of Wisconsin (Ph.D. 1941). In his best-known and most controversial work, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Fiedler uses Freudian analysis to argue the presence of subtle homosexual themes in the work of Twain, Hawthorne, and other writers. His numerous other works include An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (1955), Being Busted (1969), The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972), Freaks (1978), What Was Literature? (1982), Fiedler on the Roof (1991), and The Tyranny of the Normal (1996). Fiedler taught throughout his career, at the Univ. of Montana (1941–56) and subsequently at the State Univ. of New York at Buffalo.

Bibliography: See biography by M. R. Winchell (1986); S. G. Kellman and I. Malin, ed., Leslie Fiedler and American Culture (1999).