Description: Letters written by Leslie Fiedler to his wife Margaret from May 1944 to December 1945 while he was stationed in Hawaiʻi and various parts of the Pacific Theater as an intelligence officer during World War II.
Review Quotes:
"For the Fiedler afficionado or scholarly specialist, Writing Home will be an imperative source in the effort to help us understand the process through which Fiedler became what he was. As with many intimate letters, they show us the ways he was trying to make sense of his own life. Arresting, prickly, and resilient, they help us to see how his mind works with clues that may ultimately provide new ways of looking at his many puzzling talents." - Pittsburgh Review of Books
"After the war, Fiedler read through his letters with an eye toward using them as raw material for a memoir, but he never wrote it. This makes it all the more important that Writing Home: Selected World War II Letters of Leslie A. Fiedler should appear eighty years after their composition. Fiedler's letters bring back to life an eventful time and an extraordinary talent." - Rain Taxi
"A valuable new collection ... provides a humane intellectual's perspective on the war." - Quillette
"In Writing Home, Samuele F. S. Pardini has curated 149 letters written by Leslie A. Fiedler, a young Navy intelligence officer and future literary critic, to his wife, Margaret, between 1944 and 1945. These letters, often essay-like, delve into Fiedler's observations on war, literature and race, notably eschewing patriotic bravado ... For readers familiar with the hardships of soldiers and sailors on the frontlines, Fiedler's comparatively comfortable experience may feel frustrating. Yet it is this privilege that allowed him to write such intelligent, reflective, and thought-provoking letters." - Times Literary Supplement
"Through these letters, readers are able to enter into an immediate and vivid perspective of an American G.I. and intelligence agent during wartime. They also demonstrate the evolution of an important writer's ideas, attitudes, and values, enriching our understanding of Fiedler and exploring a previously unknown developmental region of his life." - Geoffrey Green, San Francisco State University
"Leslie Fiedler, author of the iconic Love and Death in the American Novel, was one of the most influential twentieth-century American literary critics, and his letters have great literary, biographical, cultural, and historical significance. The art of letter writing has been sadly diminished amidst our era of emailing and texting, and I marvel at the spontaneity and energy of Fiedler's prose, which was obviously unrevised." - Jeffrey Berman, University at Albany