Writing Home

<p><b>Letters written by Leslie Fiedler to his wife Margaret from May 1944 to December 1945 while he was stationed in Hawaii and various parts of the Pacific Theater as an intelligence officer during World War II.</b></p><p><b>Finalist for the 2024 </b><b><i>F</i></b><b>oreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the </b><b>War & Military</b><b> category</b></p><p>The letters in <i>Writing Home</i> offer a glimpse into a crucially formative period in the life of Leslie A. Fiedler one of the greatest literary critics and American public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Written to his wife and two sons between May 1944 and December 1945 while he was serving as a cryptologist and translator for the Office of Naval Intelligence they contain firsthand accounts of his experiences in various locations in the Pacific Theater including Hawai'i Iwo Jima Okinawa Guam and China. Constrained by Navy censors from writing directly about his work as an intelligence officer he writes instead on a variety of themes events places and war situations including the ethical contradictions between a war fought for and in the name of freedom on the one hand and the oppression of indigenous Hawai'ians and prisoners of war on the other. He also questions the mainstream European-centered view of the war and provides new insights into the role of Jewish servicemen in World War II. Finally the letters document the beginning of the formation of American intellectual life in the years preceding the Cold War forcing us to rethink certain premises of American exceptionalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Taken together they offer a unique and fascinating immersion into history through the eyes of one of the makers of post-World War II American literary culture.</p>