Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930
– October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor
of Humanities at Yale University. Following the publication of his first book
in 1959, Bloom wrote more than forty books, including twenty books of literary
criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. During his lifetime,
he edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and
philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have
been translated into more than 40 languages.
Bloom was a
defender of the Western canon at a time when literary departments were focusing
on what he called the "literature of resentment" (multiculturalists,
feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives, and others). He was educated at Yale
University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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A collection of
Bloom’s writings about the best American writers, The American Canon, was
described thusly by Amazon.com:
No critic has better understood the ways writers influence one another—how
literary traditions are made—and no writer has helped readers understand this
better, than Harold Bloom. Over the course of a remarkable sixty-year career,
in such bestselling books as The Western Canon, Shakespeare:
The Invention of the Human, and How to Read and Why, Bloom has
brought enormous insight and infectious enthusiasm to the great writers of the
Western tradition, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to the British Romantics and
the Russian masters. Now, for the first time, Bloom has brought together his
brilliant writings about the American tradition to form the ultimate guide to
our nation’s literature.
Assembled with David Mikics (Slow Reading in a Hurried Age), this unprecedented collection gathers five decades’ worth of Bloom’s writings— much of it hard to find and long unavailable—including essays, occasional pieces, and introductions as well as excerpts from his books. It offers deep readings of 47 essential American writers, reflecting on the surprising ways they have influenced each other across more than two centuries. The story it tells, of American literature as a recurring artistic struggle for selfhood, speaks to the passion and power of the American spirit.
All of the visionary American writers who have long preoccupied Bloom―Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville, and Dickinson, Faulkner, Crane, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop―make their appearance in The American Canon, along with Hemingway, James, O’Connor, Ellison, Hurston, Le Guin, Ashbery and many others. Bloom’s passion for these classic writers is contagious, and he reminds readers how they have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be better versions of ourselves. Bloom, Mikics writes, “is still our most inspirational critic, still the man who can enlighten us by telling us to read as if our lives depended on it: Because, he insists, they do.”
For readers who want to deepen their appreciation of American literature, there's no better place to start than The American Canon.
Assembled with David Mikics (Slow Reading in a Hurried Age), this unprecedented collection gathers five decades’ worth of Bloom’s writings— much of it hard to find and long unavailable—including essays, occasional pieces, and introductions as well as excerpts from his books. It offers deep readings of 47 essential American writers, reflecting on the surprising ways they have influenced each other across more than two centuries. The story it tells, of American literature as a recurring artistic struggle for selfhood, speaks to the passion and power of the American spirit.
All of the visionary American writers who have long preoccupied Bloom―Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville, and Dickinson, Faulkner, Crane, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop―make their appearance in The American Canon, along with Hemingway, James, O’Connor, Ellison, Hurston, Le Guin, Ashbery and many others. Bloom’s passion for these classic writers is contagious, and he reminds readers how they have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be better versions of ourselves. Bloom, Mikics writes, “is still our most inspirational critic, still the man who can enlighten us by telling us to read as if our lives depended on it: Because, he insists, they do.”
For readers who want to deepen their appreciation of American literature, there's no better place to start than The American Canon.
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Stanley Fish
wrote a eulogy for Harold Bloom in the October 19, 2019, issue of The Atlantic. It is a dense and hard to read piece that is
worth reading slowly and carefully.
See: https://outline.com/TbZGWM
.
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