Love and Death in the American Novel

By Leslie A. Fiedler

Book Overview

A provocative work of American literary criticism covering Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and others. Fielder's groundbreaking work changed the way we see the American novel--and American culture at large--forever.

Leslie Fiedler was one of the most influential critics of the twentieth century, a maverick of American letters whose fearless and impassioned criticism polarized readers but also informs much of our understanding of American literature and culture today. First published in 1960, Love and Death in the American Novel is Fiedler's magnum opus, a groundbreaking study of the American novel from the time of the revolution to the time of Fiedler's writing.

Fiedler conceived of his book as being itself a kind of gothic novel, one whose subject was the American experience as portrayed in classic American fiction. Through clear-eyed examinations of the works of writers such as Cooper, Poe, Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, and Faulkner, Fiedler makes the audacious--and compelling--argument that the American novel differs from its European counterpart in its inability to deal with sexuality between men and women, and its obsession instead with violence, escape, and death.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1681379694
• ISBN13: 9781681379692
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.

Customer Reviews

INDISPENSABLE FOR ANY STUDENT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

How quickly Americans forget. No one covers American literature with more knowledge, humor, insight and depth. This work is an American classic like the classics he covers: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn & The Scarlet Letter. I don't know how you get through graduate school without reading this work, the first in a trilogy. Fiedler's other two fine books being Waiting for the End, and The Return of the Vanishing American.