The death of literary critic Leslie A. Fiedler, at 85, on January 31, marked the end of an era in American culture. For just over half a century, Fiedler provoked, startled, and at times irritated academics, culture watchers, and general readers with his iconoclastic and extraordinarily knowledgeable re-evaluations of American literature and social thought. In a career that began in the late 1940s, Fiedler essentially laid the groundwork for what we now call postmodern, critical, race, queer, and feminist theory in 17 books of literary and cultural criticism and seven works of fiction.

Born in 1917 in Newark, New Jersey, to immigrant parents, Fiedler — like many Jewish intellectuals who would become cultural machers before and after World War II — put himself through college by working at night. (He sold ladies’ shoes.) He joined the armed forces, where he worked as a cryptologist for the Navy. Just before the war, and then after, he taught at the University of Montana. From 1964 until his death, he was a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

It is impossible to pigeonhole Fiedler’s place in literary culture. Postwar academics and critics of the 1940s and ’50s promoted a wide range of new approaches — from Marxist and Freudian theory to the New Criticism — for interpreting classic and contemporary work. But Fiedler evolved his own singular method of inquiry into American culture. His criticism was most obviously unique in its focus on race, eroticism, and class. While other critics — such as Dwight McDonald and Edward Huberman — focused on how class structure influenced American culture, Fiedler grappled with the influence of race and sex decades before anyone else did. His 1949 essay " Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey! " was a shocking look at Mark Twain’s The Adventures Huckleberry Finn, in which Fiedler argued that the novel was the quintessential American love story — a homoerotic relationship between a white man and a " colored " man.

This essay was the basis for one of the central claims of his Love and Death in the American Novel (1960): that male flight from " feminizing " Europe is a dominant theme in American culture, as is celebration of an all-male world where racial, rather than gender, difference is the most vital constituent. His thesis — which holds up in works from Rip van Winkle, Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, and The Last of the Mohicans to The Defiant Ones and the Lethal Weapon series — explicates the feminist critique that American literature hates or ignores women, and bolsters claims by queer theorists that viewing culture single-mindedly through the lens of heterosexuality blinds us to its most interesting parts. Indeed, Fiedler’s genius as a critic lay in his interest in the " outsider " position — be it in his analysis of the (sometimes hidden) centrality of the Native American in US literature in The Return of the Vanishing American (1968); the moral and cultural position of blacks, Jews, women, and homosexuals in The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972); or of the physically different in Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978.)

But the best part of Fiedler’s work — as with all great, intuitive, renegade critics such as Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus — was the pleasure of reading him. Few critics could entertain us with such perfect phrases as " the delicate line between obscenity and art is inconceivable to the American mind, " or overwhelm us with the ability to tie together a huge mass of culture, as he did in his chapter on the myth of the seduced virgin from Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Clarissa to Herman Wouk’s 1955 bestseller Marjorie Morningstar — both of which appeared in Love and Death in the American Novel. Indeed, one of the most exciting aspects of Fiedler’s work was his nearly manic ability to make what at first seemed like crazy connections — such as the one between the Indian princess Pocahontas and her more modern counterpart, the Jewish-American princess — seem both logical and downright illuminating, as he did in The Return of the Vanishing American. At its best, Fiedler’s mind seemed to work like the brain of someone stoned or on acid — but in his case, all those brilliant flashes turned out to be true. It’s no accident, then, that one of his most noted books was Being Busted (1969), detailing his arrest for possession of pot and the five-year legal battle, which he finally won, to get the charges dropped.

Fiedler’s readers knew that he loved everything he wrote about — he was passionate about it, whether it be Susanna Rowson’s 1791 enormously popular and best-selling tearjerker Charlotte Temple or the TV miniseries Roots. His genius was that he understood how all culture — from the classics to junk movies — reflected our basic concerns about sex and identity, class and social position. Because for Fiedler, all culture was popular culture.