Description: Despite his often-unacknowledged influence, academics, intellectuals, and the general audience in America and abroad still read Leslie Fiedler's work and draw on its concepts. He inspired both reverence (Leonard Cohen penned: "leaning over the American moonlight / like the shyest gargoyle / who will not become angry or old") and rage (Saul Bellow called him "the worst fucking thing that ever happened to American literature"). The essays in "The Devil Gets His Due" will reacquaint readers with the depth and breadth of Fiedler's achievements. Tackling subjects ranging wildly from Dante, Ezra Pound, and Mary McCarthy to Rambo, Iwo Jima, and Jerry Lewis, these writings showcase Fiedler's pioneering of an egalitarian canon that encompassed both "high" and popular literature, cinema, and history. As such, they show a powerful mind critiquing whole aspects of a culture and uncovering lessons therein that remain timely today. A lengthy introduction by Professor Samuele F. S. Pardini offers both context and history, with an in-depth profile of Fiedler and his career as both a literary critic and a public intellectual.
Review Quotes: PRAISE FOR LESLIE FIEDLER
"Fiedler was the original chest-thumping extrovert of American criticism, and no one ever did it better." --Slate "One of the most daring skinny-dippers in U.S. literary and social criticism ... Fiedler has boldly led his readers down whirlpools of the national subconscious." --Time "A scandalous interpreter of American literature and an all-around intellectual wild man." --Chronicle of Higher Education "Fiedler's masterpiece Love and Death in the American Novel [is] usually regarded ... as one of the few indispensable works in the field. But Fiedler's ideas resonated far beyond the academy to echo throughout American culture ... [An] indelible, invaluable critic." --Bookforum "It is impossible to read Leslie Fiedler's criticism without a sense of awe and excitement." --The Los Angeles Times