Leslie Fiedler's literary criticism broke ground

Leslie Fiedler, a literary critic and professor of American literature who explored themes of race and male bonding in such American literary classics as "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville and "The Last of the Mohicans" by James Fenimore Cooper, died Wednesday at home in Buffalo, N.Y. He was 85 and suffered from Parkinson's disease.

Mr. Fiedler's pronouncements were inspiring to some, offensive to others — particularly his fellow literary critics.

He burst on the scene in 1948 with "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey," an essay that focused on the interracial friendship between Huck, a teenage white boy, and Jim, an older black slave, that Mr. Fiedler saw as central to the Mark Twain novel.

The essay first appeared in the Partisan Review magazine, and Mr. Fiedler expanded on its theme 11 years later in "Love and Death in the American Novel."

Reviewers took sides, for and against Mr. Fiedler's revisionist reading of several classics. Some called him "a serious clown." Most preferred "incorrigible rascal." One accused him of "fouling the American nest."

Despite the furor Mr. Fiedler precipitated, his views on sex and race in American storytelling became "common wisdom," his biographer, Mark Royen Winchell, told the Los Angeles Times last week.

"Fiedler's influence is so diffuse it is no longer even recognized as his," said Winchell, whose book "Too Good To Be True, The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler," was published last year.

"Before Fiedler, hardly any literary critics discussed race and sexuality in American literature. Since him, they talk about hardly anything else," Winchell said.

Mr. Fiedler was born in Newark, N.J., and graduated from New York University. He went on to the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University for graduate degrees.

"Fiedler's Freudian orientation and strong-arm tactics are unfailingly evocative and illuminating," wrote a critic for Commonweal magazine in 1960. "You'll quarrel with him on every page, but that new light is there."

As a college student, he referred to himself as an anti-communist Trotskyite. Yet, when World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Navy. He was sent to the Naval Japanese Language School in Colorado and served as an interpreter in Iwo Jima, China and Okinawa.

After his military service he returned to the faculty of the University of Montana. He was appointed chairman of the English Department and also became director of humanities studies during his 23 years on the faculty.

Several of his early essays explored the theme of assimilation in Jewish American literature, a topic close to him and several of his friends who were up-and-coming Jewish American authors at the time. Among them were Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow.

"More than anything, Mr. Fiedler was a '50s Jewish intellectual who claimed this country as his own, just as Philip Roth and Norman Mailer did," said Greil Marcus, a critic based in Northern California.

In Montana, Mr. Fiedler brought his literary heroes to campus. William Faulkner, the reigning Southern novelist, was "terrible" as a lecturer to the general public but "great" in the classroom setting, Mr. Fiedler told Salon magazine in an interview that appeared last month.

In 1964, Mr. Fiedler left Montana to join the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he spent the rest of his life on the English faculty. He brought beat-poet Allen Ginsberg to campus and regaled students with his stories about meeting Ernest Hemingway in Ketchum, Idaho.

In 1995, a devastating fire destroyed Mr. Fiedler's home library of some 5,000 books. Losses included a signed copy of his friend Bernard Malamud's "The Natural," a first edition of James Joyce's "Ulysses" and original bound galleys of Joseph Heller's "Catch 22."

Mr. Fiedler is survived by his second wife, Sally; six children from his first marriage; two stepchildren; nine grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.