Leslie Fiedler

Literary Critic

• Born: March 8, 1917
• Birthplace: Newark, New Jersey
• Died: January 29, 2003
• Place of death: Buffalo, New York

Biography

Leslie Aaron Fiedler was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 8, 1917, the son of Jacob J. Fiedler, a pharmacist, and the former Lillian Rosenstrauch. His maternal grandfather, Leon R. Rosenstrauch, first provoked young Fieldler’s literary interests with folk and fairy stories. Fiedler’s grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants who had known the deprivations of life in czarist Russia. The boy grew up in an urban neighborhood peopled largely by Jews and blacks who did not interact a great deal, but both groups interested him. The public library attracted young Fiedler more than the schools he attended in Newark.

From the year 1934, when he enrolled as a freshman in New York University, until his last years, Fiedler was associated with higher education. Upon his graduation in 1938, he earned his M.A. at the University of Wisconsin in 1939, and his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1941. His marriage to Margaret Ann Shipley in 1939 resulted in three sons and three daughters and lasted until the early 1970’s, when the couple divorced and Fiedler married Sally Anderson.

From 1941 to 1964, Fieldler taught English at the University of Montana, meanwhile earning respect as an important American literary and social critic. Particularly notable were his essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” in 1948, and his Love and Death in the American Novel, first published in 1960, and later revised and reissued. The former, a homoerotic interpretation of the relationship between the young protagonist and the slave Jim in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, reflected Fielder’s strong interest in Freudian psychological theory. The latter contrasts the themes of love and death as presented in European and American fiction. Fiedler argued that American novelists have been characteristically unable to create mature love relationships, while being preoccupied with death to the point of obsession. Fiedler concluded that American literature was mainly about “boys,” a charge that also can be leveled at Fiedler’s own novels and short stories.

In 1964, Fiedler accepted a professorship at the University of Buffalo and continued his stream of critical writing. Cultivating an image as a rebel against traditional high culture, he was one of the first academic critics to turn his attention extensively to aspects of popular culture. He also contributed to the growing field of feminist criticism. Despite the scorn he heaped on advocates of what he regarded as literary elitism, the targeted critics have usually felt obliged to render him their serious attention.

While at Montana and Buffalo, he accepted a series of visiting professorships at such institutions as Princeton University, Yale University, and the Universities of Sussex and Vincennes. Among his many academic honors were Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim fellowships, the 1957 National Institute of Arts and Letters prize in creative writing, and election to the American Academy of Letters in 1988. Beset by a variety of illnesses in his last years, including Parkinson’s disease, Fiedler died on January 29, 2003, a few weeks short of his eighty-sixth birthday.