High-minded lowdown

Not everyone was as stiff as Adorno. In the U.S. during the '50s, intellectuals were often fascinated by mass culture, and some made an honest effort to assess it. One of the best and in some ways the most awkward was the Partisan Review critic Robert Warshow. His best-known essays -- collected in "The Immediate Experience" -- concern the gangster, the western movie and the comic "Krazy Kat." You feel his valiant effort to come to terms with these important phenomena, but the closest he gets to admitting the pleasures of pop is describing his son's excitement over a comics club. Though born in 1917, the same year as Fiedler, Warshow projects both analytic rigor and the strain of earnestness.

Fiedler, on the other hand, was intoxicated by pop even as he approached it as an old-school scholar. "Though he was a champion of pop culture, he was kind of caught between two worlds," said Ritz. "He describes himself as a voyeur, not a participant. He was all about equivocation, being in two places and never being in one."

His tone, from a half-century ago, remains contemporary. "If literary blogs had been around in Fiedler's day," said Richard Nash, who published the new collection, "he would have been just loving it, in the sense of being a provocateur. He'd have been on nerve.com or had his own blog."

"Devil" includes pieces on the movies about the Vietnam War, the fantasy writer Philip Jose Farmer, the comedy and telethons of Jerry Lewis, and an essay on Kurt Vonnegut written for Esquire. One of the few 20th century English writers Fiedler took seriously was Olaf Stapledon, the visionary science-fiction novelist to whom he devoted an entire book.

Fiedler wasn't the only one to see outer space as the ultimate "West," and he followed literature to the fringes, including writers of the drug experience. (Though he was famously busted in the late '60s in a marijuana frame-up and later acquitted, it's not clear that Fiedler ever smoked anything stronger than a Cuban cigar.)

"What I like," said Pardini, the new volume's Italian-born editor, "is that he made the case for popular culture as a barometer of the public condition. 'Gone With the Wind' was an awful book, and he knew it, but the point was, 'Why do we like this stuff?' "

It would be easy to divide Fiedler's career into halves: the Montana period, during which he wrote largely about literature and penned "Love and Death," and his decades at State University of New York in Buffalo, where he wrote more about popular subjects.