Why the American Novel Refused to Grow Up

"He made chutzpah a literary form!” proclaims a blurb on the back cover of a collection of essays and stories by the literary critic and enfant terrible Leslie Fiedler. It is just the sort of affronting remark that Fiedler was known to venture, and there’s reason to suspect that he wrote the blurb himself; the telltale sign is that it concludes with his favorite jolt of punctuation. Exclamation marks, generally rare in works of sober scholarship, are strewn with abandon throughout his classic and controversial study “Love and Death in the American Novel,” originally published in 1