The most controversial of all the American Myth Critics, and the most important, is Leslie Fiedler …, whose first book, An End to Innocence, Essays on Culture and Politics (1955), was not actually concerned with literary criticism. Two of the pieces, however, did introduce the theories which eventually become the dogma of No! In Thunder (1960), his second collection of previously published essays; Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), his monumental, seminal, sometimes brilliant, sometimes sophomoric study of the American novel from its beginnings to 1959; and Waiting for the End (1964), in which he carried this study through 1963.

The most famous essay in An End to Innocence is "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" in which Fiedler introduced three of his pet theories: 1) the American classics have failed to deal frankly with "adult heterosexual love"; 2) Moby-Dick, Two Years Before the Mast, Huckleberry Finn, and the Leatherstocking Tales are really...