Seventy-five years ago a brilliant, edgy English professor at the (then) Montana State University (now the University of Montana) published an essay with the gaudy title: “Montana; or The End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” Having arrived eight years earlier from “the East” (he grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison), Leslie Fiedler proclaimed the state a “Tertiary or pseudo-Frontier” in which the non-Indigenous locals bought into the Romantic myth that portrayed them as noble pioneers.
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Still Haunted by Fiedler’s “Montana Face”
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Seventy-five years ago a brilliant, edgy English professor at the (then) Montana State University (now the University of Montana) published an essay with the gaudy title: “Montana; or The End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” Having arrived eight years earlier from “the East” (he grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison), Leslie Fiedler proclaimed the state a “Tertiary or pseudo-Frontier” in which the non-Indigenous locals bought into the Romantic myth that portrayed them as noble pioneers.