Leslie Fiedler: “Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!”, June 1948

Literary critic Leslie Fiedler's first important published work appeared in June 1948, and came about as a result of his reading American novels to his sons. The essay appeared in the Partisan Review, a journal, and was the subject of a great amount of critical debate and controversy.

"Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" argued that a recurrent theme in American literature was an unspoken or implied homoerotic relationship between men, and famously used Mark Twain's iconic fictional creations, Huckleberry Finn and his African American companion Jim, as examples.

Fiedler argued that in numbers of American novels pairs of men flee together into the wilderness rather than remain in the civilizing and domesticated world of women. Fiedler also deals with this theme of male bonding in his books Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Waiting for the End (1964) and The Return of the Vanishing American (1968).

As Mark Royden Winchell writes in his 2002 book on Fiedler, "Reading ‘Come Back to the Raft’ over half a century later, one tends to forget that, prior to Fiedler, few critics had discussed classic American literature in terms of race, gender, and sexuality" (Winchell 53). Fiedler emphasized that males paired in these wilderness adventures tend to be of different races, and that their relationships include issues of masculinity and touch on intimacy, sensuality, and suppressed sexuality between men.

"Come Back to the Raft" not only caused a stream of letters of protest to be sent to the Partisan Review, but it also was attacked by the critical community.

ADD DESCRIPTIONS OF THE CRITICAL LETTERS.

In 1995, queer theorist Christopher Looby argues that Fiedler's claims, published the late 1940s and 1960s, were noticeably given from his own urban, 20th century perspective and did not adequately address the time period in which Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn, or the time period in which the story was set. (See, for example, the debate on the sexuality of Abraham Lincoln; and see: "'Innocent Homosexuality': The Fiedler Thesis in Retrospect." In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Conroversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995. Pp. 535-50.)