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...