Harold Bloom (1930–2019) was an American literary theorist and critic renowned for his original—and controversial—analyses of literary history and the creation of literature. The author of over 40 books, he made scholarly topics accessible to the general reader.
Born in New York City’s East Bronx to Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia, Bloom started reading the poets Walt Whitman and Hart Crane when he was eight years old. Bloom graduated in 1951 from Cornell University, where he studied under the celebrated literary critic M. H. Abrams and lived abroad as a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge’s Pembroke College. After earning his doctorate from Yale in 1955, he joined that school’s English faculty.
Bloom spent his working life as a Yale professor, dedicating himself to the Romantic literary tradition. He is best known for his books The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975,) which argued that all great writers are fixated with breaking away from the great writers of the past. His other works expounded this thesis further.
Bloom’s other bestseller is The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages (1994,) which championed 26 significant writers, from Dante to Shakespeare to Beckett, and contemporaries Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. Bloom’s list of books raised controversy, not only for what was on it and what not but also because Bloom’s recommended writers were all white and almost all male.
Bloom wrote many other notable books for general readers, including Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998,) How to Read and Why (2000,) and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003.)
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Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
—Harold Bloom
Topics: Solitude
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
—Harold Bloom
Topics: Criticism
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
—Harold Bloom
Topics: Criticism
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike—and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two—are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
—Harold Bloom
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