Boys Own

"The American literary tradition, he writes, is remarkable for its consistent refusal to depict or describe adult 'heterosexual love.' Unlike pretty much the rest of civilizational art in all its history, American literature avoids exploring affection between men and women as a pattern or motivation of human existence. What it offers instead is prepubescent diet fare: adventure books and sea tales, the Never Never Literature of life before sex. In this fiction, writes Fiedler, 'there is finally no heterosexual solution which the American psyche finds completely satisfactory.'"

Zoë Hu at The Baffler looks back to Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel.