Love and Death in the American Novel

Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel is a study of American fiction from its beginnings up through the 1960s. In this tour de force from the great mid-twentieth-century era of literary criticism, Fiedler argues that American literature is gothic at heart, marked by a terror of sexuality and an obsession with violence, escape, and death. The American writer, he says, confronts a world that is "without a significant history or a substantial past; a world which had left behind the terror of Europe not for the innocence it dreamed of, but for new and special guilts associated with the rape of nature and the exploitation of dark-skinned people." Fiedler's own book, as brilliantly written as it is provocatively conceived, is itself a contribution to American literature. His puckish suggestion is that we read it "not as a conventional scholarly book—or an eccentric one—but a kind of gothic novel (complete with touches of black humor) whose subject is American experience as recorded in our classic fiction."