As the filmmaker begins his footwork, he finds other readers who were initially thwarted by favorite novels. One of them is the literary critic Leslie Fiedler, who died last month at 85. He talks in a magnificently cantankerous way about his long courtship of Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep," which for years was considered a long-forgotten one-shot masterpiece. A wisp of a smile plays above the thundercloud of a beard that surrounds his face when Fiedler tells the camera he won out. He disarms Mr. Moskowitz's wonderment over Mr. Mossman's singular achievement by asserting, "It's more typical for a writer to write one book and stop."