SOURCE: "The Jew in the American Novel," in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, Vol. 11, Stein and Day, 1971, pp. 65-117.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1959, Fiedler surveys the defining characters and characteristics of the Jewish-American novel as they developed up to the end of the 1930s.

Foreword

This essay is intended to be not exhaustive but representative. The few writers who are discussed at any length are those who seem to me (and my personal taste plays a role of which any reader enamored of objectivity should be warned) both most rewarding as artists and most typical as actors in the drama of Jewish cultural life in America. I have not deliberately, however, omitted as untypical any Jewish American fictionist of first excellence. I am aware of how many rather good novelists I have slighted (along with some rather bad ones whom I am...