That book as now revised seems to me a more shapely and for
that reason a clearer one -- one in which, for instance, the balance
between psychological and sociological insights essential to my
approach is more readily perceived; and the relation of both to
the books I best love more cogently exposed. And especially, I
hope, even the most casual reader will be able this time around to
recognize the sense in which Love and Death can be read not as
a conventional scholarly book -- or an eccentric one -- but a kind
of gothic novel (complete with touches of black humor) whose
subject is the American experience as recorded in our classic fic-
tion. Our most serious as well as our funniest writers have found
the gothic mode an apt one for telling the truth about the quality
of our life; and I should, therefore, have been ashamed not to try
to use it for my own purposes.

Despite all these safeguards, however, I discover that my exci-
sions and re-arrangements have given a new pattern and rhythm
and pace to a statement unaltered in substance and only slightly
modified in tone. If Love and Death is a more spare and elegant
book this time around, it is because it can afford to be a less
forensic, even a less formidable one.

It has survived into a new literary era and will, I trust, continue
to flourish in a new cultural climate, which, indeed it may have
helped to create. The year 1960 is not very far behind us; but
certain kinds of criticism still practiced and admired then -- the
last examples of the new genteel tradition, with its emphasis on
textual analysis, its contempt for general ideas, and its fear of
popular culture -- now strike us as irrelevant and remote. It is my
sense of the continuing relevance and immediacy of this study
which has impelled me to recast and re-issue it. It is my hope that
to new readers and old, it will seem still as lively and in the
best sense of the word, as vulgar as ever.

LESLIE A. FIEDLER
Buffalo, New York
January, 1966

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