"Not everyone was as stiff as Adorno. In the U.S. during the '50s, intellectuals were often fascinated by mass culture, and some made an honest effort to assess it. One of the best and in some ways the most awkward was the Partisan Review critic Robert Warshow. His best-known essays--collected in 'The Immediate Experience'--concern the gangster, the western movie and the comic 'Krazy Kat.' You feel his valiant effort to come to terms with these important phenomena, but the closest he gets to admitting the pleasures of pop is describing his son's excitement over a comics club. Though born in 1917, the same year as Fiedler, Warshow projects both analytic rigor and the strain of earnestness.
"Fiedler, on the other hand, was intoxicated by pop even as he approached it as an old-school scholar. 'Though he was a champion of pop culture, he was kind of caught between two worlds,' said Ritz. 'He describes himself as a voyeur, not a participant. He was all about equivocation, being in two places and never being in one.'"
Upon the publication of a new book of essays, Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times remembers critic Leslie Fiedler.
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