In The Star Rover London indicts the savagery of prison life: San Quentin death row inmate Darrell Standing can escape his confinement and torture only by withdrawing into dreams of past lives during what he calls his "eternal recurrence on earth." Thus the fantastic becomes a vehicle for exposing social inequities and religious hypocrisy. Leslie Fiedler, Samuel Clemens Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo and an essayist, poet, and critic, provides an important introduction to this often neglected classic.