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“... about The Naked Lunch, a famous cult novel of the Beat generation. A not unsympathetic critic, Leslie Fiedler, found much of it ‘dull protest literature, manifestoes against cops and in favour of junkies and homosexuals’ – which is not sympathetic, but not right either. I can’t call to mind anything less ‘in favour of’ drugs or ...”

“... to be serious.’ Well and good. But the critic selected as ‘appropriate’ for Stapledon is Leslie Fiedler, whose career in letters has taken the form of a campaign to demolish canons, pantheons and Arnoldian critical seriousness. (His latest shot is called What was Literature?) Fiedler, one expects, would rather ...”

“... the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you.’ Leslie Fiedler found another kind of boredom in Pilgrimage, one he defended, grudgingly, as ‘a warranty of its commitment to truth and the dull reality we all inhabit’. The notion of a ‘commitment to truth’ is acceptable enough, but the novel’s ...”

“... praised by more senior and noteworthy critics, including Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler. In the novel’s memorable first sentence, it is possible to hear an exhilaration and release missing from his two earlier books. This is Augie’s Whitmanesque introduction of himself, an introduction, too, of a new voice in Bellow’s ...”

“... audience might well respond: calm down. And maybe it was this kind of vein-popping hyperbole that Leslie Fiedler had in mind when he wrote of Jarrell: ‘He is resolutely unsystematic, committed to no methodology or aesthetic theory – responsible only to his own responses, hushed only before the mystery of his own taste. And what unfailing taste he ...”

“... Roots (the novel and the mini-series), The Birth of a Nation is part of the cycle that the late Leslie Fiedler called America’s ‘inadvertent epic’. One could add Oscar Micheaux’s early novels and polemical films, Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadasssss Song, the radio show Amos n’ Andy, The Bill Cosby Show, Ken Burns’s PBS ...”

“... Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all through friends and books. All ...”

“... has been doubted whether in the US we have produced any at all. Or so things stood in 1960, when Leslie Fiedler published Love and Death in the American Novel, four years after Norman Rush graduated from Swarthmore College, where he met the woman whose ‘heart, sensibility and intellect are so signally – if perforce esoterically – celebrated and ...”

“... and is not part of a fictional world. Are Huck and Jim really having a homosexual relationship, as Leslie Fiedler suggests, in the world of Huckleberry Finn? Wolterstorff has a keen eye for the logical conundrum. Suppose Henry Kissinger were to play the lead role in a play about Henry Kissinger. Would we have the same relation there between actor and ...”

“... engineering’ and of its capacity to produce fresh monstrosities in laboratories, and what Leslie Fiedler calls in his recent book on freaks ‘myths and images of the secret self’. None of these phenomena except possibly the last, however, can explain the fascination which the Elephant Man had for the working-class patrons of the show in the ...”

“... of the College of Santa Fe, where a conference on Lawrence’s work was taking place, Professor Leslie Fiedler described the procession as ‘obscene’. To me it had seemed just absurd and vaguely humiliating. It reminded me a little of all those other ad hoc ceremonial occasions making a stab at solemnity that one sees from time to time on ...”

“... complete lover? Oddly enough, I don’t believe the answer should be the apparently obvious one. Leslie Fiedler may have thought that Hemingway’s inability to imagine a woman properly was one step from homosexuality, but then Fiedler’s ideas about proper women were, as he delights in telling us, formed by Freud ...”

“... Activities Committee, simply went along with the whole thing, became incensed onlookers (like Leslie Fiedler), or just kept quiet as their friends were tarred and feathered, ostracised and sacked from their jobs. Saunders is very good on the connections between the Wasp establishment (a sort of consortium) and the CIA, and on how important, socially ...”

“... began to grow in 1956, when Call It Sleep was the only novel mentioned twice – by Kazin and Leslie Fiedler – in a printed symposium on ‘The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years’. In 1964, Irving Howe described it in the New York Times Book Review as ‘one of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century ...”

“... as what we should now call a ‘woman-hater’ – a view anticipated, in their own ways, by Leslie Fiedler and Marilyn French – it does at least have the merit of demonstrating just how far the misogynist line can be taken. If Jardine’s interpretations of plays by Shakespeare and other contemporary dramatists are correct, these works ought to ...”