“I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.”

t’s the birthday of literary critic Leslie A. Fiedler, (books by this author) born in Newark, New Jersey (1917). Fiedler shot to fame in 1948 at the age of 31 with his essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” which caused an uproar for its frank discussion of race, gender, and sexuality in American literature, using The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an example. Fiedler became well known for his challenging essays, most of them collected in his book Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). He’s credited with coining the phrase “postmodernist literature.”

He said, “I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.”