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Letters written by Leslie Fiedler to his wife Margaret from May 1944 to December 1945 while he was stationed in Hawaii and various parts of the Pacific Theater as an intelligence officer during World War II.
Finalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the War & Military category
The letters in Writing Home offer a glimpse into a crucially formative period in the life of Leslie A. Fiedler, one of the greatest literary critics and American public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Written to his wife and two sons between May 1944 and December 1945, while he was serving as a cryptologist and translator for the Office of Naval Intelligence, they contain firsthand accounts of his experiences in various locations in the Pacific Theater, including Hawai'i, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Guam, and China. Constrained by Navy censors from writing directly about his work as an intelligence officer, he writes, instead, on a variety of themes, events, places, and war situations, including the ethical contradictions between a war fought for and in the name of freedom on the one hand and the oppression of indigenous Hawai'ians and prisoners of war on the other. He also questions the mainstream, European-centered view of the war and provides new insights into the role of Jewish servicemen in World War II. Finally, the letters document the beginning of the formation of American intellectual life in the years preceding the Cold War, forcing us to rethink certain premises of American exceptionalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Taken together, they offer a unique and fascinating immersion into history through the eyes of one of the makers of post–World War II American literary culture.
"For the Fiedler afficionado or scholarly specialist, Writing Home will be an imperative source in the effort to help us understand the process through which Fiedler became what he was. As with many intimate letters, they show us the ways he was trying to make sense of his own life. Arresting, prickly, and resilient, they help us to see how his mind works with clues that may ultimately provide new ways of looking at his many puzzling talents." — Pittsburgh Review of Books
"After the war, Fiedler read through his letters with an eye toward using them as raw material for a memoir, but he never wrote it. This makes it all the more important that Writing Home: Selected World War II Letters of Leslie A. Fiedler should appear eighty years after their composition. Fiedler's letters bring back to life an eventful time and an extraordinary talent." — Rain Taxi
"A valuable new collection … provides a humane intellectual's perspective on the war." — Quillette
"In Writing Home, Samuele F. S. Pardini has curated 149 letters written by Leslie A. Fiedler, a young Navy intelligence officer and future literary critic, to his wife, Margaret, between 1944 and 1945. These letters, often essay-like, delve into Fiedler's observations on war, literature and race, notably eschewing patriotic bravado … For readers familiar with the hardships of soldiers and sailors on the frontlines, Fiedler's comparatively comfortable experience may feel frustrating. Yet it is this privilege that allowed him to write such intelligent, reflective, and thought-provoking letters." — Times Literary Supplement
"Through these letters, readers are able to enter into an immediate and vivid perspective of an American G.I. and intelligence agent during wartime. They also demonstrate the evolution of an important writer's ideas, attitudes, and values, enriching our understanding of Fiedler and exploring a previously unknown developmental region of his life." — Geoffrey Green, San Francisco State University
"Leslie Fiedler, author of the iconic Love and Death in the American Novel, was one of the most influential twentieth-century American literary critics, and his letters have great literary, biographical, cultural, and historical significance. The art of letter writing has been sadly diminished amidst our era of emailing and texting, and I marvel at the spontaneity and energy of Fiedler's prose, which was obviously unrevised." — Jeffrey Berman, University at Albany
Leslie A. Fiedler (1917–2003) was SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel L. Clemens Professor of English at the University at Buffalo and one of America's foremost literary and cultural theorists of the last century. The New York Times praised his book Love and Death in the American Novel as "one of the great, essential books on the American imagination." Samuele F. S. Pardini is Professor of American Studies and Italian Studies at Elon University. He is the author of In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen, which won the 2018 Italian American Studies Association Book Award, and the editor of The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie A. Fiedler.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Letters
Introduction: Writing (As) Home
Samuele F. S. Pardini
1. En Route to San Francisco: May 7–10, 1944
2. San Francisco: May 11–19, 1944
3. En Route to Hawai'i: May 20–30, 1944
4. Hawai'i: June 1–December 25, 1944
5. At Sea in the Pacific: February 3–April 26, 1945
6. Back in Hawai'i: April 30–July 6, 1945
7. Guam: September 4–16, 1945
8. En Route to China: September 17–29, 1945
9. Tientsin, China: September 30–December 4, 1945
10. En Route to Pearl Harbor: December 6–15, 1945
11. Pearl Harbor: December 16–21, 1945
12. Homebound: December 22–25, 1945
Notes
Bibliography
Index