Leslie Fiedler we have always with us. For roughly two decades now he has been intellectually stagnant and muddled, prolifically redundant, obsessed with shoring up his ever more dubious fame, pitching one-liners to an empty house. It would be a kindness if he were to declare a moratorium on self-promotion, but nothing appears less likely. Indeed, in his twenty-second and most autobiographical book, What Was Literature?, he has made his most sustained effort yet to convince us that history is on his side.¹ Though the book leaves a quite opposite impression, there can be little hope that Fiedler will be deterred by the cold welcome it has already received. He is like a bag lady permanently camped on the doorstep of criticism, muttering imprecations at the insiders and keeping warm by waving enthusiastically to oblivious passers-by.

Part I of What Was Literature?, characteristically titled “Subverting the Standards,” is Fiedler’s retrospect on the years since World War II, with particular reference to his own part in the struggle between high and popular culture. We follow him from humble origins—proletarian-Jewish in Newark, then miserable in Missoula, having to pass for a fellow-traveler of WASP academic pretensions—through persecution and exile following the famous pot bust in Buffalo, to his present status as a living legend who is free to declare that his cultural affinities have been, all along, those of an impressionable teenager. And in Part II, “Opening Up the Canon,” he argues that the popular