Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction Sympathy for the Devil. Looking Backward for a New Tradition Samuele F. S. Pardini xiii
Toward an Amateur Criticism 3
"Giving the Devil His Due" 13
Explication de Texte Inferno Canto XXVI 25
D. H. Lawrence on D. H. Lawrence As Told to Leslie A. Fiedler 34
The Deerslayer 37
Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey! 46
New England and the Invention of the South 54
Huckleberry Finn: The Book We Love to Hate 64
"As Free as Any Cretur …" 77
1601 86
Is Shakespeare Dead? 92
The State of Writing 99
Edmund Wilson's Criticism: A Re-examination 104
The Ordeal of Criticism 107
Love is not Enough 111
The Intellectual Roots of Anti-Intellectualism 115
A Fortyish View 120
Intellectual Uncles 125
The Canon and the Classroom: A Caveat 128
Ezra Pound: The Poet as Parodist 136
Francis Scott Fitzgerald 148
Pop Goes the Faulkner: In Quest of Sanctuary 149
Looking Back After 50 Years 162
Robert Penn Warren: A Final Word 172
Capote's Tale 181
The City and the Writer 183
Style and Anti-Style in the Short Story 187
The Higher Unfairness 199
Encounter with Death 202
A Homosexual Dilemma 204
The Noble Savages of Skid Row 207
Up from Adolescence 210
The Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut: Portrait of the Novelist as Bridge over Troubled Water 2l5
Notes on Philip José Farmer 230
The Return of James Branch Cabell; Or, the Cream of the Cream of the Jest 236
Who Really Died in Vietnam? The Cost in Human Lives 246
James Fenimore Cooper: The Problem of the Bad Good Writer 252
Mythicizing the Unspeakable 263
The Legend 274
Getting It Right: The Flag Raisings atIwo Jima 282
Mythicizing the City 296
Whatever Happened to Jerry Lewis? That's Amore… 304
