Leslie Fiedler

Celebrity critic who liked to provoke

Leslie Aaron Fiedler, writer and critic: born Newark, New Jersey 8 March 1917; Professor of English, State University of New York at Buffalo 1964-2003, Suny Distinguished Professor 1987-2003, Chair, Department of English 1974-77, Samuel Langhorne Clemens Professor of English 1973-2003; married 1939 Margaret Shipley (three sons, three daughters; marriage dissolved 1972), 1973 Sally Andersen (two stepsons); died Buffalo, New York 29 January 2003.

At a time when American academics were poorly paid and usually little known, Leslie Fiedler managed to be rich and famous. A writer and teacher, Fiedler was enormously influential, both as a seminal figure in the field of American studies, and as a critic who opened up formerly forbidden subjects. As his biographer Mark Royen Winchell noted:

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

Fiedler was born in New Jersey in 1917, the son of Jewish immigrants, and after growing up in Newark attended New York University, working his way through college by selling woman's shoes. He subsequently took an MA and PhD at the University of Wisconsin, though his studies were interrupted by the Second World War. Enlisting in the navy, he became a cryptologist before being sent to language school to learn Japanese; during the late campaigns in the Pacific, he served as an interpreter. He was on Iwo Jima to witness the famous raising of the Stars and Stripes over the captured island.

After the war, Fiedler joined the faculty at the University of Montana, an obscure and somewhat improbable place for an East Coast intellectual, but none the less a teaching job in an era when English departments at tonier institutions were loath to hire Jews. He stayed happily in Montana for 23 years, eventually becoming chairman of the department, which became known for its hospitality to visiting writers – William Faulkner and W.H. Auden among them. Fiedler himself visited Ernest Hemingway in nearby Idaho shortly before the writer's suicide, and his moving account of the visit describes his astonishment at finding the heroic figure of American letters almost pathetically unsure of himself, filled with doubts about the value of his lifetime's work.

Concentrating on American literature, Fiedler soon became famous too, after the publication in 1948 of an article, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey", in the prestigious quarterly Partisan Review. Examining Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Fiedler focuses on the relationship between the boy narrator Huck and the older runaway slave Jim, finding the friendship between the two at the core of the classic's fabulist power.

It is a Freudian reading of the text, concentrating on concealed racial and sexual undertones, which left many critics uncomfortable – the strait-laced were especially appalled at the homoerotic implications of Fiedler's article, already suggested by the playful irreverence of its title. In fact, overt homosexuality is not really the focus of Fiedler's thesis, but rather the near-obsession of American writers with male bonding, and the corresponding failure of heterosexual love.

His arguments were broadened in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), which brought the same kind of Freudian, psychosexual investigation to most of the fictive masterpieces of American literature. It was an enormously influential book, for it not only looked at American classics from a thoroughly Modernist vantage point, it also confirmed that the new discipline of American Studies was capable of producing creative and intelligent critical work.

Fiedler now revelled in the controversies he liked to provoke, and capitalised on them: he moved in 1964 to the State University of New York in Buffalo, to one of very few chairs established for such luminaries (the novelist John Barth was another) with the then quite incredible salary of $100,000. Here Fiedler remained high-profile, participating fully in the "counter-culture" life of the Sixties – protesting against the Vietnam War, getting "busted" by the local police for possession of marijuana (he fought the charges for over five years and finally won).

Increasingly in his work Fiedler focused on popular culture rather than literature, though he amassed an extraordinary library of modern first editions (over 5,000 volumes) that was tragically destroyed in a fire in 1995. He seemed happier to tout the virtues of horror movies or comic strips than engage in literary scholarship, admitting that he had "a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis . . . I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love."

His energy undiminished even in old age, Fiedler continued to write prolifically about popular culture, published two novels and two collections of stories, and spoke and taught at virtually every leading American university.

Always interested in his own Jewish identity, Fiedler shared none of the ambivalence felt by many Jewish-American novelists of his generation, who were unhappy to be tagged as anything but American writers – indeed in later years Fiedler was happy to declare that his proclaimed identity as a Jew had actually helped rather than hindered his career. His suggestion that other writers had also traded on their Jewishness infuriated many of them, especially Saul Bellow, a long-time friend who now became an undisguised enemy – told of Fiedler's regret that no one would say kaddish over his corpse because none of his children knew Hebrew, Bellow replied, "If he's willing to die now, I'll say it for him."

For, although Fiedler still had many friends, usually on the alternative side of any cultural or political fence, he often seemed more interested in provoking people than provoking thought. Yet the influence of his early work on American literature is pervasive – if often unattributed, such is its centrality in the American critical landscape.

Andrew Rosenheim