Aggressive, cocksure, intellectually sadistic, dogmatic, gossipy, and more keenly involved with contemporary America than probably any of his critical peers, Professor Leslie Fiedler … has written [Waiting for the End], a justly bitter book that withholds neither his derisive intelligence nor his superior independence. Misleadingly subtitled "a new work on the crisis in American culture, race and sex," and sub-subtitled "a portrait of 20th-century American literature and its writers," it is an incisively personal and unofficial mixture from both these Ph.D. lodes issuing in a single verdict: failure in American life and letters.

With a rare if boisterous courage inspired by his almost total pessimism, Mr. Fiedler faces realities that must cost him dearly as a fully committed teacher and novelist-critic who has given his most energetic years to a stance he now questions in the extreme. Passionately involved in prose literature, he now dispassionately foresees the increasing...