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  Books Why the American Novel Refused to Grow Up For the critic Leslie Fiedler, the country’s best and worst fiction was shaped by visions of escape from society—and therefore from maturity. By  June 1, 2026 “Love and Death in the American Novel,” ostensibly a history of American fiction, is in fact “a kind of gothic novel,” as Fiedler described it, with a quick pulse and a wry, expansive style. Illustration by Jack Smyth; Source photographs from Getty Save this story “He made chutzpah a literary form!” proclaims a blurb on the back cover of a collection of essays and stories by the literary critic and enfant terrible Leslie Fiedler. It is just the sort of affronting remark that Fiedler was known to venture, and there’s reason to suspect that he wrote the blurb himself; the telltale sign is that it concludes with his favorite jolt of punctuation. Exclamation marks, generally rare in works of sober scholarship, are strewn with abandon throughout his classic and controversial s...