CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- IntroductionSympathy for the Devil. Looking Backward for a New Tradition.by Samuele F. S. Pardini -- Toward an Amateur Criticism -- "Giving the Devil His Due" -- Explication de Texte Inferno Canto XXVI -- D. H. Lawrence on D. H. Lawrence As Told to Leslie A. Fiedler -- The Deerslayer -- Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey! -- New England and the Invention of the South -- Huckleberry Finn: The Book We Love to Hate -- "As Free as Any Cretur . . ." -- 1601 -- Is Shakespeare Dead? -- The State of Writing -- Edmund Wilson's Criticism: A Re-examination -- The Ordeal of Criticism -- Love is not Enough -- The Intellectual Roots of Anti-Intellectualism -- A Fortyish View -- Intellectual Uncles -- The Canon and the Classroom: A Caveat -- Ezra Pound: The Poet as Parodist -- Francis Scott Fitzgerald -- Pop Goes the Faulkner: In Quest of Sanctuary -- Looking Back After 50 Years -- Robert Penn Warren: A Final Word -- Capote's Tale -- The City and the Writer -- Style and Anti-Style in the Short Story -- The Higher Unfairness -- Encounter with Death -- A Homosexual Dilemma -- The Noble Savages of Skid Row -- Up from Adolescence -- The Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut: Portrait of the Novelist as Bridge over Troubled Water -- Notes on Philip José Farmer -- The Return of James Branch Cabell -- Or, the Cream ofthe Cream of the Jest -- Who Really Died in Vietnam? The Cost in Human Lives -- James Fenimore Cooper: The Problem of the Bad Good Writer -- Mythicizing the Unspeakable -- The Legend -- Getting It Right: The Flag Raisings at Iwo Jima -- Mythicizing the City -- Whatever Happened to Jerry Lewis? That's Amore . . . -- ABOUT THE AUTHOR.