The Devil Gets His Due The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler

by Fiedler, Leslie; Pardini, Samuele F. S.

• ISBN13: 9781593761882
• ISBN10: 1593761880
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-01
• Publisher: Counterpoint

Summary

For more than 50 years, Leslie Fiedler played a pivotal role in the development of American literary culture. Despite his often unacknowledged influence, the academy, intellectuals, and the general audience in America and abroad still read his work and draw on its concepts. The essays in The Devil Gets His Due 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Sympathy for the Devil. Looking Backward for a New Tradition	p. xiii
Toward an Amateur Criticism	p. 3
"Giving the Devil His Due"	p. 13
Explication de Texte Inferno Canto XXVI	p. 25
D. H. Lawrence on D. H. Lawrence As Told to Leslie A. Fiedler	p. 34
The Deerslayer	p. 37
Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!	p. 46
New England and the Invention of the South	p. 54
Huckleberry Finn: The Book We Love to Hate	p. 64
"As Free as Any Cretur..."	p. 77
1601	p. 86
Is Shakespeare Dead?	p. 92
The State of Writing	p. 99
Edmund Wilson's Criticism: A Re-examination	p. 104
The Ordeal of Criticism	p. 107
Love is not Enough	p. 111
The Intellectual Roots of Anti-Intellectualism	p. 115
A Fortyish View	p. 120
Intellectual Uncles	p. 125
The Canon and the Classroom: A Caveat	p. 128
Ezra Pound: The Poet as Parodist	p. 136
Francis Scott Fitzgerald	p. 148
Pop Goes the Faulkner: In Quest of Sanctuary	p. 149
Looking Back After 50 Years	p. 162
Robert Penn Warren: A Final Word	p. 172
Capote's Tale	p. 181
The City and the Writer	p. 183
Style and Anti-Style in the Short Story	p. 187
The Higher Unfairness	p. 199
Encounter with Death	p. 202
A Homosexual Dilemma	p. 204
The Noble Savages of Skid Row	p. 207
Up from Adolescence	p. 210
The Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut: Portrait of the Novelist as Bridge over Troubled Water	p. 215
Notes on Philip Jose Farmer	p. 230
The Return of James Branch Cabell; Or, the Cream of the Cream of the Jest	p. 236
Who Really Died in Vietnam? The Cost in Human Lives	p. 246
James Fenimore Cooper: The Problem of the Bad Good Writer	p. 252
Mythicizing the Unspeakable	p. 263
The Legend	p. 274
Getting It Right: The Flag Raisings at Iwo Jima	p. 282
Mythicizing the City	p. 296
Whatever Happened to Jerry Lewis? That's Amore...	p. 304
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