Leslie Fiedler, 85; Critic and Scholar Explored Roles of Sex and Race in American Storytelling

Leslie Fiedler, the literary critic and professor of American literature who explored themes of race and male bonding in such literary classics as "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville and "The Last of the Mohicans" by James Fenimore Cooper, died Wednesday at home in Buffalo, N.Y. He was 85 and suffered from Parkinson's disease.

Fiedler's pronouncements were inspiring to some, offensive to others -- particularly his fellow literary critics. He burst on the scene in 1948 with "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey," an essay that focused on the interracial friendship between Huck, a teenage white boy, and Jim, an older black slave, that Fiedler saw as central to the Twain novel.

The essay first appeared in the Partisan Review magazine, and Fiedler expanded on its theme 11 years later in "Love and Death in the American Novel." Reviewers took sides on Fiedler's revisionist reading of several classics. Some called him "a serious clown." Most preferred "incorrigible rascal." One accused him of "fouling the American nest."

Despite the furor Fiedler caused, his views on sex and race in American storytelling became "common wisdom," his biographer, Mark Royen Winchell, told The Times this week. "Fiedler's influence is so diffuse it is no longer even recognized as his," said Winchell, whose book "Too Good To Be True: The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler" was published last year. "Before Fiedler, hardly any literary critics discussed race and sexuality in American literature. Since him, they talk about hardly anything else."

Fiedler was born in Newark, N.J., and graduated from New York University. He went on to the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University for graduate degrees.

He proved to have a brilliant mind, which made it difficult, later in life, for critics to dismiss him.

"Fiedler's Freudian orientation and strong-arm tactics are unfailingly evocative and illuminating," wrote a critic for Commonweal magazine in 1960. "You'll quarrel with him on every page, but that new light is there."

As a college student, he referred to himself as an anti-communist Trotskyite.

When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Navy. He was sent to the Naval Japanese Language School in Colorado and served as an interpreter in Iwo Jima, Okinawa and China.