Too good to be true
Subtitle: the life and work of Leslie Fiedler
By: Mark Royden Winchell.
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Columbia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 366
Subjects: Fiedler, Leslie A.; Criticism -- United States -- History -- 20th century.; Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography.; Critics -- United States -- Biography.
Genres: Biography.
Description: ""Too Good to Be True" is a comprehensive account of Leslie Fiedler's life and work. Born in 1917, Fiedler has, in a sense, had four overlapping careers. He first came to prominence as one of the premier Jewish intellectuals of the postwar era - writing on literature, culture, and politics in such magazines as Partisan Review and Commentary. Shortly thereafter, he helped lead the attack that myth criticism was mounting on the hegemony of the New Criticism.

If he had stopped writing entirely at that point, Fiedler would still be remembered as an important cultural critic of the fifties." "With his brash magnum opus, Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler next established himself as a revolutionary interpreter of our native literary tradition. Subsequent critics of American literature have been compelled to adopt or attack his positions because to ignore them has been impossible.".

"Finally, Fiedler was one of the first critics to proclaim the death of modernism and to suggest some of the directions that literature might take in its aftermath. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with being the first individual to apply the term postmodernism to literature.This alone caused much enmity among those who had built their careers on the assumption that modernism would last forever.".

"To many academics, Fiedler's lack of solemnity and his wild flights of imagination have made him appear amateurish. How could anyone who enjoys himself that much possibly be taken seriously? One of the favorite critics of young people and non-English majors, Fiedler has seemed to enjoy remaining disreputable - even as some of his once-controversial views have been made a part of standard or traditional scholarship.

Like Huck Finn, returned to the raft from the fog, he often seems "too good to be true."" ""Too Good to Be True" will be of great interest to scholars and students of American literature, twentieth-century literary criticism and popular culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 343-349) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Preface ix; title: Acknowledgments xi; title: Part One: Flight from the East (1917-1955); title: I. Newark Jew 3; title: 2. All the Irvings Did 19; title: 3. Those Beautiful Chinese Nights 35; title: 4. Too Good to Be True 49; title: 5. Enfant Terrible 63; title: 6. A Newer Criticism 78; title: 7. Discovering America 94; title: Part Two: Celebrity Nut (1955-1971); title: 8. Eliezar Ben Leah 119; title: 9. Heavy Runner 132; title: 10. From Princeton to Athens 145; title: II. American Gothic 160; title: 12. East Toward Home 175; title: 13. True West 192; title: 14. Innocence Reclaimed 208; title: Part Three: Starting Over (1971 -); title: 15. Sacred and Profane 233; title: 16. Till the Tree Die 249; title: 17. Eleanor Mooseheart 266; title: 18. Mutants New and Old 281; title: 19. For Sam and Hattie 296; title: 20. Moses in Aspen 312; title: 21. The Sorcerer's Apprentice 328; title: Bibliography 343; title: Index 351.