Leslie A. Fiedler’s ‘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.” —Brandon Taylor LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL Leslie A. Fiedler Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel is a study of American fiction from its beginnings up through the 1960s. In this tour de force from the great mid-twentieth-century era of literary criticism, Fiedler argues that American literature is gothic at heart, marked by a terror of sexuality and an obsession with violence, escape, and death. The American writer, he says, confronts a world that is "without a significant history or a substantial past; a world which had left behind the terror of Europe not for the innocence it dreamed of, but for new and special guilts associated with the rape of nature and the exploitation of dark-skinned people." Fiedler's own book, as brilliantly written as it is provocatively conceived, is itself a contribution to American literature. His puckish suggestion is that we read it "not as a conventional scholarly book—or an eccentric one—but a kind of gothic novel (complete with touches of black humor) whose subject is American experience as recorded in our classic fiction." “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 BUY THE BOOK   For three days only, Love and Death in the American Novel is available at 25% off along with a selection of mid-twentieth-century American novels: WARLOCK Oakley Hall BUY THE BOOK IN A LONELY PLACE Dorothy B. Hughes BUY THE BOOK THE OUTWARD ROOM Millen Brand BUY THE BOOK THE MOUNTAIN LION Jean Stafford BUY THE BOOK You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. You can choose the types of mailings you wish to receive: Update preferences   New York Review Books 207 East 32nd Street New York, NY 10016-6305 Not a subscriber? Sign up for our newsletter here. Unsubscribe