"Too Good to Be True" is a comprehensive account of Leslie Fiedler's life and work. Born in 1917, Fiedler has, in a sense, had four overlapping careers. He first came to prominence as one of the premier Jewish intellectuals of the postwar era -- writing on literature, culture, and politics in such magazines as Partisan Review and Commentary. At approximately the same time, he helped lead the attack that myth criticism was mounting on the hegemony of the New Criticism. If he had stopped writing entirely at that point, Fiedler would still be remembered as an important cultural critic of the fifties.

With his brash, groundbreaking magnum opus, Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler established himself as a revolutionary interpreter of our native literary tradition. Subsequent critics of American literature have been compelled to adopt or attack his positions because to ignore them has been impossible.

Fiedler was one of the first critics to proclaim the death of modernism and to suggest some of the directions that literature might take in its aftermath. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with being the first individual to apply the term postmodernism to literature. This alone caused much enmity among those who had built their careers on the assumption that modernism would last forever.

To many academics, Fiedler's lack of solemnity and his wild flights of imagination have made him appear amateurish. How could anyone who enjoys himself that much possibly be taken seriously? One of the favorite critics of young people and non-English majors, Fiedler has seemed to enjoy remaining disreputable -- even as some of his once-controversial views have been made a part of standardor traditional scholarship. Like Huck, returned to the raft from the fog, he often seems "too good to be true."

Mark Royden Winchell has made his subject come alive in a highly intelligent and critical way. A combination of biography, critical analysis, and cultural history, "Too Good to Be True" will be of great interest to scholars and students of American literature, twentieth-century literary criticism, and popular culture.

During a career that spanned sixty years, Cleanth Brooks was involved in most of the major controversies facing the humanities from the 1930s until his death in 1994. He was arguably the most important American literary critic of the mid-twentieth century. Because it is impossible to understand modern literary criticism apart from Cleanth Brooks, or Cleanth Brooks apart from modern literary criticism, Mark Royden Winchell gives us not only an account of one man's influence but also a survey of literary criticism in twentieth-century America. More than any other individual, Brooks helped steer literary study away from historical and philological scholarship by emphasizing the autonomy of the text. He applied the methods of what came to be called the New Criticism, not only to the modernist works for which these methods were created, but to the entire canon of English poetry, from John Donne to William Butler Yeats. In his many critical books, especially The Well Wrought Urn and the textbooks he edited with Robert Penn Warren and others, Brooks taught several generations of students how to read literature without prejudice or preconception.