The fact that Leslie Fiedler chose to express his essay with very controversial vocabulary was very clever. His “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” in Partisan Review captured immediate attention. The choice of such vocabulary as “queer as three dollar bills” (referring to Huck and Jim) for a controversial thesis in itself must have caused a tremendous impact in1948. I am sure if Fiedler chose to write his essay using less controversial terms as he later did in 1982 or as in Love and Death it still would have evoked an outrage, but I am sure it wouldn’t have captured as wide of an audience as it did in 1948.
I have not read as much American literature as Fiedler has, so it is hard to fairly evaluate Love and Death in the American Novel. However, I would have to agree with such statements as “Where is our Madame Bovary, our Anna Karenina, our Pride and Prejudice or Vanity Fair?” Nothing so far in American literature had captured me as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or War and Peace for example. His characters and their passionate love affairs are truly unforgettable.