Novelist and short story writer Jack London (1876-1916) contemplated the strange theory of astral travel, penning The Star Rover in 1914. The last of London's fifty books, which include White Fang and The Call of the Wild, The Star Rover centers on San Quentin prison inmate Darrell Standing, a former university professor who is serving a life sentence for murdering a colleague. To escape the tortures of his confinement, he withdraws into dreams of past lives in which he experiences what he calls his "eternal recurrence on earth." Thus the fantastic becomes a vehicle for exposing the social...

Leslie Fiedler's radical opinions and theories have changed the way we think about American literature and pop culture, challenging long-established schools and ushering in a genre of first-person, experience-based criticism. Praised and respected as "one of the most important figures in the history of American cultural thought in this century," Fiedler introduced groundbreaking ideas that now permeate university studies in literature: a homoerotic element in American machismo, interracial dependence as the classical American bond, those on the social margins being "secret selves," and the...

Despite his often-unacknowledged influence, academics, intellectuals, and the general audience in America and abroad still read Leslie Fiedler s work and draw on its concepts. He inspired both reverence (Leonard Cohen penned: "leaning over the American moonlight / like the shyest gargoyle / who will not become angry or old") and rage (Saul Bellow called him "the worst fucking thing that ever happened to American literature"). The essays in The Devil Gets His Due will reacquaint readers with the depth and breadth of Fiedler s achievements. Tackling subjects ranging wildly from Dante,...