The most controversial of all the American Myth Critics, and the most important, is Leslie Fiedler …, whose first book, An End to Innocence, Essays on Culture and Politics (1955), was not actually concerned with literary criticism. Two of the pieces, however, did introduce the theories which eventually become the dogma of No! In Thunder (1960), his second collection of previously published essays; Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), his monumental, seminal, sometimes brilliant, sometimes sophomoric study of the American novel from its beginnings to 1959; and Waiting for the End (1964), in which he carried this study through 1963.

The most famous essay in An End to Innocence is "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" in which Fiedler introduced three of his pet theories: 1) the American classics have failed to deal frankly with "adult heterosexual love"; 2) Moby-Dick, Two Years Before the Mast, Huckleberry Finn, and the Leatherstocking Tales are really boys' books; and 3) each of the above celebrates "the mutual love of a white man and a colored."… It is in this same essay that Fiedler offered the following nebulous definition of what was already a much abused word: "by 'archetype' I mean a coherent pattern of beliefs and feelings so widely shared at a level beneath consciousness that there exists no abstract vocabulary for representing it, and so 'sacred' that unexamined, irrational restraints inhibit any explicit analysis. Such a complex finds a formula or pattern story, which serves both to embody it, and, at first at least, to conceal its full implications." This concealment, which D. H. Lawrence considered characteristic of the American classics, becomes an essential part of the mythic complex which it is the duty of the critic to uncover. Unfortunately, Fiedler became overzealous in his pursuit of hidden meanings, and his theories (e.g., his insistence that "Miscegenation is the secret theme of the Leatherstocking novels, especially of The Last of the Mohicans" … inevitably suffered from his Barnum and Bailey showmanship. (pp. 151-52)

Fiedler's next book, No! in Thunder not only allied him with the great nay-sayers of the past but also revealed—in its subtitle, Essays on Myth and Literature—that he had turned fully now to literary criticism. Cantankerous as ever, he arrogantly announced from the rooftops that he hoped once again to offend "all those with 'cemeteries to defend'." Denying that he was with all his "occasional hamminess, an entertainer," he insisted that as a moralist he had set out in this "autobiography" to expose that which "is shallow, self-deceiving or specious in our culture…."

In one of the best known essays in the book, "Archetype and Signature, The Relationship of Poet and Poem," Fiedler rejected the New Critics' claim that any work of art should be completely self-contained, and he welcomed biographical-historical facts as most useful and illuminating in making known the author's intentions. To Fiedler, "There is no 'work itself,' no independent formal entity which is its own sole context; the poem is the sum total of many contexts, all of which must be known to know how to evaluate it." One of these contexts is the writer's biography, and the critic must be familiar with it because, "In deed as in word, the poet composes himself as maker and mask, in accordance with some contemporaneous mythos of the artist."… (pp. 152-53)

Fiedler's definitions of "archetype" (which he had fumbled with unsuccessfully in the earlier essay on Huck Finn) and "signature" merit full quotation. "Archetype," which he preferred to "myth" because of its current ambiguity, means "any of the immemorial patterns of response to the human situation in its most permanent aspects: death, love, the biological family, the relationship with the Unknown, etc., whether those patterns be considered to reside in the Jungian Collective Unconscious or the Platonic World of Ideas. The archetypal belongs to the infra- or meta-personal, to what Freudians call the id or the unconscious; that is, it belongs to the Community at its deepest, pre-conscious levels of acceptance."… (p. 153)

Demonstrating once again that archetypal patterns do not have to depend on myths that are centuries old, Fiedler turned to another of his favorite subjects in "The Eye of Innocence, Some Notes on the Role of the Child in Literature." First observing the modern literary phenomenon of moving the child from a supporting role to a central position in fiction, Fiedler saw this revolution as part of the much broader Romantic movement from a belief in Original Sin to a belief in Original Innocence. He called this movement "the Psychic Breakthrough, the Reemergence of the Id." Deriving fiendish delight from his choice of kindergarten-level terminology, he traced the archetypal role of the child in literature from the Good Good Girl ("the blonde asexual goddess of nursery or orphanage" …) to the Good Bad Boy (Tom Sawyer), and touched on all the variations in between. Eventually, at some point in the nineteenth century, the heart, Romantic symbol of the child and primal innocence, was split in two, giving the reader the Fair Virgin and her counterpart, the Dark Lady, as well as the Good Indian and the Bad. "In each case, the Dark Double represents the threat of sex as well as that of death …"…. (p. 155)

Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel … stirred up even more controversy than his essays. In this monumental study he returned to many of his original theories and expanded upon them at great length, with more of the histrionics which had irritated and consequently alienated so many of his colleagues. (p. 156)

Fiedler both invited and welcomed such criticism as a badge of honor. In his preface, he immediately admitted that his study "is not, in the customarily accepted sense of the word, an academic or scholarly book…." The omission of footnotes and formal bibliography revealed not a rigid reliance on "fact" but dependence "on insight and sensitivity to nuance." Arguing that no one critic can possibly do justice to the whole spectrum of critical approaches—textual, historical, biographical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, or generic—he was attempting in his book "to emphasize the neglected contexts of American fiction, largely depth-psychological and anthropological, but sociological and formal as well."… Anticipating the objections of his detractors, he made it perfectly clear that he offered his interpretations "not as alternative to standard ways of reading but as complementary to them: I find no greater pleasure than in reminding myself that my interpretations are as partial as those which bore me the most."… But such humility was shortlived, and Fiedler could not resist adding, "To redeem our great books from the commentaries on them is one of the chief functions of this study."… (pp. 156-57)

A final assessment of a controversial study the thickness and complexity of Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel is difficult. It is easy to point out carelessly inaccurate facts, meretricious generalizations that collapse under close scrutiny, and the irritatingly flamboyant style. There will always be some critics annoyed by Fiedler's slighting of such talented novelists as Howells, Wharton, Lewis, and Dos Passos while inflating the virtues of Charles Brockden Brown, Nathanael West, and Wright Morris. More serious is the charge of reductivism and oversimplification. Cowley's legitimate complaint about Fiedler's "loosely Freudian method, with its emphasis on love and death, eros and thanatos, is that it doesn't provide a standard for choosing the best works or a means of revealing their superiority to lesser works." Howe agreed and wrote that Fiedler's "method … disregards the work of literature as something 'made,' a construct of mind and imagination through the medium of language, requiring attention on its own terms and according to its own structure" [see excerpt above]. However, despite this valid criticism, Fiedler's book remains a prodigious, exciting, seminal contribution which must be acknowledged in any future study of American fiction. (pp. 158-59)