Leslie Fiedler [who died last week at 85] “made his name, in the late ’40s, as a lit-crit prodigy in the grim-faced Cold War literary establishment known today as the New York Intellectuals or “the family.” He could easily have set himself up simply as an Upper West Side sage. He was charismatic and leonine and had the credentials — an outsized oeuvre, ease with languages (Japanese, Italian), lecture gigs all over the world. Crowing was his natural idiom. He was a master of hectoring overstatement…”