Being Busted

"This is Leslie Fiedler's long-awaited book about the marijuana scandal that disrupted his life, his family, his university, and that made headlines all over the Western world. Being Busted is also an informal social history of the last few decades told in terms of the three times that Fiedler has been at logger-heads with the police and the authorities. The first time was in the 1930's in Fiedler's home town, Newark, New Jersey; Fiedler was a radical, and the cops were out to bust the radicals. The second time was in Missoula, Montana, where for a quarter of a century the authorities kept trying to bust Professor Fiedler because of his unorthodox literary views, because he was an easterner, a Jew, and otherwise intolerable. The third time the cops busted Fiedler in Buffalo for allegedly maintaining a premise(s) where marijuana was being used." (from front flap) The memoir-Jeremiad by Leslie (Aaron) Fiedler (1917-2003), the award-winning & prolific Jewish-American literary critic & academician. A quintessential fist-shaking 1960s-era manifesto of radical resistance against the then-prevailing American governmental & societal "establishment" by a most-contrarian contemporary public intellectual. Fiedler's experience of being set-up for a marijuana bust & its nightmarish, Kafkaesque oppressive consequences reminds us somewhat of the predicaments that befell our just-deceased friend, the iconic American poet-radical John Sinclair- albeit the latter was of a later generation at the very heart of the counterculture, & the analogy isn't quite exact. Hardcover in unclipped dust jacket, first edition, first printing though neither specifically explicated as such at copyright page (which does not refer to any further editions or printings). From the collection of George Bornstein (1941-2021), author, scholar & academician here at the University of Michigan- a True Man of Letters who was a dearly missed friend & mentor to this writer. A hard-hit…