The roster of "great critics and historians of American literature in this century," the New York Times Book Review once announced, "would have to include Leslie [Aaron] Fiedler, by far the least academic, [and] the most voluble, diverse, uneven, divisive, [and] rambunctious." Although Fiedler himself has wryly noted that the adjective "controversial" has become associated with his name so frequently as to seem part of it, few scholars would dispute that Fiedler's identification of sexual and racial motifs, which owes much in boldness and terminology to psychoanalytic theory, has decisively shaped the interpretation of letters in the United States. His fecund essays and books, especially Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), have been distinguished by exceptional freshness of insight, ambitiousness of assertion, and pungency of expression. He has also had three novels, three novellas, and a collection of short stories published, though his fiction has not earned...