Love and Death in the American Novel

“Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel is one of the greatest books ever written about American literature. It makes some provocative assertions, true, but more than anything, it’s this high-velocity voice-driven exploration of what makes American literature itself. And Fiedler is pound for pound just one of the most incredible stylists we’ve ever seen. It’s a book that provoked me and challenged me and taught me how to think deeper and sharper and better and bolder in language. A stunning book.” —Brandon Taylor

”[Love and Death] is an incredible repository of vexations, bafflements, witticisms, and brilliancies. Ostensibly a history of American fiction from 1789 to 1959, it is in fact ‘a kind of gothic novel,’ as Fiedler described it, with a quick pulse and a wry, expansive style … It is a polemical, spirited salvo that never pretends to be a work of dispassionate social science. Its tone is decisive, but it speaks with the imperious authority of taste, not the desiccated one of surveys and statistics … ‘I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis,’ [Fiedler] once confessed in a review. ‘I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.’ And, in Love and Death, how he howls!” —Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker

“One of the great, essential books on the American imagination … an accepted major work.” —The New Yorker

“Prof. Fiedler’s entertaining account of the American novel’s obsessions remains one of the key works of American studies.” —Publishers Weekly

“Genuinely original … a work of lasting importance … a powerful indictment of our culture and of modern culture in general.” —Richard Chase

“I know few works of criticism that are so likely to involve the reader whose interest in literature is not of a professional kind … it amounts to a general cultural history of the nation.” —Lionel Trilling

“In its insights the book remains immensely intelligent, immediate, and vital.” —David Plante, Bookforum

“It is not possible to read Leslie Fiedler’s criticism without a sense of awe and excitement.” —Los Angeles Times

“Dr. Fiedler’s witty, exasperating, energetic, penetrating book will prove indispensable…a high level of scholarship and intelligence.” —The Specator

“Something of a classic…witty and arresting…[Fiedler] has contrived to make the Americana heritage less wholesome, but far more interesting than once seemed likely.” —Encounter

Leslie A. Fiedler (1917-2003) was born in Newark, New Jersey, and educated at New York University and the University of Wisconsin. He served as a Japanese interpreter with the United States Navy during World War II and was, for many years, a professor of English at the University of Montana and the State University of New York at Buffalo.

He published two novels and three collections of short stories but was best known as a versatile and incisive critic. Among his books are Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, The Stranger in Shakespeare, and Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity.

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