Bloom, Harold 1930-
Bloom, Harold 1930-
PERSONAL:
Born July 11, 1930, in New York, NY; son of William (a garment factory worker) and Paula Bloom; married Jeanne Gould, May 8, 1958; children: Daniel Jacob, David Moses. Education: Cornell University, B.A., 1951; Yale University, Ph.D., 1955. Religion: Jewish.
ADDRESSES:
Home—New Haven, CT. Office—Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, 53 Wall St., New Haven, CT 06520-8298.
CAREER:
Yale University, New Haven, CT, instructor, 1955-60, assistant professor, 1960-63, associate professor, 1963-65, professor of English, 1965-74, DeVane Professor of Humanities, 1974-77, professor of humani- ties, 1977—, Sterling Professor of Humanities, 1983—. Visiting Professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1959, Breadloaf Summer School, 1965-66, and Cornell University, Society for Humanities, 1968-69. New School for Social Research, visiting professor, 1982-84; Harvard University, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, 1987-88; New York University, Berg Visiting Professor of English, 1998-2004.
MEMBER:
American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Philosophical Society.
AWARDS, HONORS:
Fulbright fellowship, 1955; John Addison Porter Prize, Yale University, 1956, for Shelley's Mythmaking; Guggenheim fellowship, 1962-63; Newton Arvin Award, 1967; Melville Cane Award, Poetry Society of America, 1971, for Yeats; National Book Awards juror, 1973; Zabel Prize, American Institute of Arts and Letters, 1982; MacArthur Prize fellowship, 1985; Christian Guass Award, 1988, for Ruin the Sacred Truths; Boston Book Review Rea Nonfiction Prize, 1995, for The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages; National Book Award finalist, nonfiction, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, criticism, New York Times Notable Book of the Year, one of Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, and Booklist Editor's Choice, all 1998, all for Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; 14th Catalonia International Prize, 2002, Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, 2003. D.H.L., Boston College, 1973, Yeshiva University, 1975, University of Bologna, 1997, St. Michael's College, 1998, University of Rome, 1999, and University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, 2002.
WRITINGS:
NONFICTION
Shelley's Mythmaking, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1959.
The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1961, revised edition, Cornell University Press (Cornell, NY), 1971.
Blake's Apocalypse, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1963.
(Author of commentary) David V. Erdman, editor, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1965, revised edition published as The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 1982.
Yeats, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1970.
(Compiler) Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, Norton (New York, NY), 1970.
The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1971.
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1973, with new preface, 2001.
A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1975, with new preface, 2003.
Kabbalah and Criticism, Seabury Press (New York, NY), 1975.
Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1976.
Figures of Capable Imagination, Seabury Press (New York, NY), 1976.
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1977.
The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1979.
(With J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida) Deconstruction and Criticism, Seabury Press (New York, NY), 1979.
Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1982.
The Breaking of the Vessels, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1982.
The Strong Light of the Canonical: Kafka, Freud, and Scholem as Revisionists of Jewish Culture and Thought, privately printed, 1987.
Poetics of Influence, Schwab, 1989.
Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989.
(Interpreter) The Book of J, translated by David Rosenberg, Grove & Weidenfeld (London, England), 1990.
The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1992.
(Interpreter) The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus, translated, with introduction, critical edition of the Coptic text, and notes by Marvin Meyer, Harper San Francisco (San Francisco, CA), 1992.
(Compiler with Paul Kane) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations, Library of America (New York, NY), 1994.
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1994.
Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection, Riverhead (New York, NY), 1996.
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Riverhead (New York, NY), 1998.
How to Read and Why, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2000.
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Warner Books (New York, NY), 2002.
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, Riverhead (New York, NY), 2003.
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, Riverhead (New York, NY), 2004.
Eudora Welty, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Italian Renaissance, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, Putnam Books (New York, NY), 2005.
Dramatists and Dramas, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Fallen Angels, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2007.
Bloom's How to Write about Ernest Hemingway, Chelsea House (New York, NY), 2008.
EDITOR
English Romantic Poetry, An Anthology, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1961, two-volume revised edition, Anchor (New York, NY), 1963.
(With John Hollander) The Wind and the Rain, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1961.
(With Frederick W. Hilles) From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1965.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Selected Poetry, New American Library (New York, NY), 1966.
Walter Horatio Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, New American Library (New York, NY), 1970.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Selected Poetry, New American Library (New York, NY), 1972.
The Romantic Tradition in American Literature, 33 volumes, Arno, 1972.
(With Lionel Trilling) Romantic Prose and Poetry, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1973.
(With Lionel Trilling) Victorian Prose and Poetry, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1973.
(With Frank Kermode, Hollander, and others) Oxford Anthology of English Literature, two volumes, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1973.
(With Adrienne Munich) Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (Englewood, NJ), 1979.
(With David Lehman) The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997, Scribner (New York, NY), 1998.
Selected Poems/Walt Whitman, Library of America, (New York, NY), 2003.
The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Robert Frost, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2004.
(Introduction) American Fiction between the Wars, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
(With Jesse Zuba) American Religious Poems, Library of America (New York, NY), 2006.
William Faulkner, Bloom's Literary Criticism (New York, NY), 2008.
STUDY GUIDES; EDITOR AND AUTHOR OF INTRODUCTION
The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, Anchor (New York, NY), 1965.
Selected Writings of Walter Pater, New American Library (New York, NY), 1974.
Hamlet, Chelsea House (New York, NY), 1990.
Caddy Compson, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
Cleopatra, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
French Poetry: The Renaissance through 1915, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
Edwardian and Georgian Fiction, 1880 to 1914, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
French Prose and Criticism, 1790 to World War II, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
French Prose and Criticism through 1789, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
Holden Caulfield, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990, reprinted, 2005.
Huck Finn, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
Clarissa Dalloway, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
Modern Latin American Fiction, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
Bigger Thomas, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
Toni Morrison, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
Sophocles, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.
Shylock, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1991.
Odysseus/Ulysses, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1991.
Ahab, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1991.
Antonia, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1991.
Brett Ashley, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1991.
Macbeth, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1991, reprinted, 2005.
Willy Loman, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1991.
Gatsby, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1991.
Joan of Arc, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
Falstaff, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
David Copperfield, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
Iago, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
Caliban, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
Marlow, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
Isabel Archer, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
King Lear, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
Rosalind, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
Heathcliff, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1993.
Lolita, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1993.
Classic Science-Fiction Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Science-Fiction Writers of the Golden Age, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Modern Fantasy Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Modern Mystery Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Classic Fantasy Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Julius Caesar, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Black American Prose Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Black American Prose Writers: Before the Harlem Renaissance, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Black American Poets and Dramatists: Before the Harlem Renaissance, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Contemporary Horror Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Major Modern Black American Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Contemporary Black American Fiction Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Classic Horror Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Modern Horror Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Modern Black American Poets and Dramatists, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Emma Bovary, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Contemporary Black American Poets and Dramatists, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Major Black American Writers through the Harlem Renaissance, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Black American Women Fiction Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1994.
Modern Black American Fiction Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.
Classic Mystery Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.
Classic Crime and Suspense Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.
Robinson Crusoe, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.
Black American Poets and Dramatists of the Harlem Renaissance, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.
Modern Crime and Suspense Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.
Beowulf, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Dante's "Divine Comedy: The Inferno," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996, reprinted, 2005.
Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Sharer," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Homer's "The Odyssey," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
John Milton's "Paradise Lost," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Sophocles' Oedipus Plays: "Oedipus the King," "Oedipus at Colonus," and "Antigone," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Alex Haley and Malcolm X's "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
William Shakespeare's "Othello," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
George Orwell's "Animal Farm," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
George Eliot's "Silas Marner," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996, reprinted, 2005.
Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Herman Melville's "Billy Budd," "Benito Cereno," and "Bartleby the Scrivener," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Black American Women Poets and Dramatists, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Homer's "Iliad," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Richard Wright's "Native Son," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Vergil's "Aeneid," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
William Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part 1," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
William Golding's "Lord of the Flies," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.
Caribbean Women Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1997.
American Women Fiction Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1997.
Asian American Women Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1997.
British Women Fiction Writers, 1900-1960, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1997.
Lesbian and Bisexual Fiction Writers, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1997.
Ben Johnson, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Don Quixote, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
D.H. Lawrence, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Edgar Allan Poe, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Elie Wiesel's "Night," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Henry James, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Homer, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Italio Calvino, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Jack London, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Jean Paul Sartre, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
John Irving, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
John Keats, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
John Updike, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Anton Chekov, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Joseph Conrad, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Katherine Anne Porter, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Maya Angelou, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Ray Bradbury, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Robert Browning, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Samuel T. Coleridge, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Shirley Jackson, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Stephen Crane, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Sylvia Plath, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Tom Wolfe, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
W.E.B. Dubois, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
William B. Yeats, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Christopher Marlowe, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Cormac McCarthy, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
E.L. Doctorow, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Edith Wharton, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Elizabeth Bishop, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
H.D., Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
James Joyce, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Leo Tolstoy, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Molière, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Neil Simon, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Octavio Paz, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Oscar Wilde, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Poets of World War I: Wilfred Owen and Issac Rosenberg, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Raymond Carver, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Robert Frost, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Stendhal, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Ken Kesey's "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Thomas Mann, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Virginia Woolf, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
William Styron's "Sophie's Choice," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Albert Camus's "The Stranger," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
African-American Poets, 2 volumes, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
American Renaissance, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Bram Stoker's "Dracula," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Dante Alighieri, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
David Guterson's "Snow Falling on Cedars," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Derek Walcott, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Don Delillo, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Don Delillo's "White Noise," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Doris Lessing, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
E.E. Cummings, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
The Eighteenth-Century English Novel, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Eugene Ionesco, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Euripides, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Franz Kafka, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude: Essays," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
George Eliot, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Gwendolyn Brooks, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Hart Crane, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Herman Melville, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Hermann Hesse, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Honoré de Balzac, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
The House on Mango Street, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Huck Finn, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Isabel Allende, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
John Cheever, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Leo Tolstoy, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Marianne Moore, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Mark Strand, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Milan Kundera, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Norman Mailer, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
A Passage to India, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Philip Roth, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Poets of World War I: Rupert Brooke & Siegfried Sassoon, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Ralph Ellison, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Salman Rushdie, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Sam Shepard, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Seamus Heady, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Sherwood Anderson, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Sir John Falstaff, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
T.S. Eliot, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
The Tale of Genji, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Thomas Pynchon, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Aeschylus, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Agatha Christie, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
American and Canadian Women Poets, 1300 to Present, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
American Women Poets, 1650-1950, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Aristophanes, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
August Wilson, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Bertolt Brecht, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
American Naturalism, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Edward Fitzgerald's "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Elizabethan Drama, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
English Romantic Poets, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Greek Drama, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
James Joyce's "Ulysses," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Jane Austen's "Persuasion," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Literature of the Holocaust, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
David Mamet, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Alan Tate, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
William Shakespeare's "As You Like It," Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Elizabeth Bennet, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Emile Zola, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
George F. Babbitt, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Guy de Maupassant, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Hester Prynne, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Issac Babel, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
John Ashbery, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Julio Cortazar, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
King Arthur, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Leopold Bloom, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Nick Adams, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
William Gaddis, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Nikolai Gogol, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Paul Auster, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Rudyard Kipling, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
W.S. Merwin, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Chaim Potok's The Chosen, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Edwardian and Georgian Fiction, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Ernest Hemingway, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Franz Kafka, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Gwendolyn Brooks, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Hans Christian Andersen, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Homer's The Iliad, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
José Saramago, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Julio Cortazar, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Modern American Drama, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Modern American Poetry, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Robert Hayden, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Satan, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Toni Morrison, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Tony Kushner, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Virginia Woolf, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.
Walt Whitman, Bloom's Literary Criticism (New York, NY), 2008.
Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Chelsea House (New York, NY), 2008.
STUDY GUIDES; EDITOR AND AUTHOR OF INTRODUCTION: JUVENILE
Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
Joseph Conrad, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.
William Shakespeare, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
William Faulkner, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Maya Angelou, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Langston Hughes, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Jorge Luis Borges, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Jane Austen, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Stephen Crane, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Robert Frost, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.
Stephen King, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Walt Whitman, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
William Blake, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
William Wordsworth, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Zora Neale Hurston, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
A.E. Housman, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Albert Camus, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Aldous Huxley, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Arthur Miller, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Charles Dickens, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Emily Dickinson, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Ernest Hemingway, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Henry David Thoreau, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
James Joyce, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
John Milton, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
John Steinbeck, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Joseph Conrad, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Marcel Proust, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Mark Twain, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Tennessee Williams, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
The Brontë Sisters, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.
Lord Byron, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.
OTHER
(Author of introduction) Kim Bechnel, Bloom's How to Write about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bloom's Literary Criticism (New York, NY), 2008.
(Author of introduction) Christine Kerr, Bloom's How to Write about J.D. Salinger, Chelsea House (New York, NY), 2008.
(Author of introduction) Catherine J. Kordich, Bloom's How to Write about Jane Austen, Bloom's Literary Criticism (New York, NY), 2008.
(Author of introduction) Catherine J. Kordich, Bloom's How to Write about John Steinbeck, Bloom's Literary Criticism (New York, NY), 2008.
(Author of introduction) Anna Priddy, Bloom's How to Write about Emily Dickinson, Bloom's Literary Criticism (New York, NY), 2008.
(Author of introduction) Laurie A. Sterling, Bloom's How to Write about Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bloom's Literary Criticism (New York, NY), 2008.
Also author of Freud: Transference and Authority, 1988.
SIDELIGHTS:
The Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Harold Bloom is considered by many to be the best-known literary critic in America today, as well as the most controversial. Describing the influence of the past upon poetry as a relationship of conflict, Bloom's writings have consistently contradicted mainstream trends in literary theory.
When Bloom declared his theory of poetic creation in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry and its companion work, A Map of Misreading, he built his discussion on the model of Oedipal conflict asserted by Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis. Freud stated that each infant views its father as a rival for its mother's attention, and wishes to take its father's place. Bloom's adaptation of Freud recasts the infant, father, and mother in the roles of belated poet, precursor poet, and Muse of poetic inspiration, respectively. Bloom also states that, like the Freudian concept of "repression" of motives from consciousness and behavior, literary influence is sometimes notable by omission. In a Diacritics interview with Robert Moynihan, Bloom acknowledged conventional methods of tracing the presence of similarities between poems, but then asserted the importance of looking at what is not in a particular poem: "I think this is a much more interesting and vital area in which interpoetic relationships tend to cluster. That is, what is it which is missing or all but present in a poem, what is suggested or evaded? That is usually, I think, a much better path, or hidden path, hidden channel, for what is taking place between two poems…. To a considerable extent, I try to study those hidden pressures."
Also in the Diacritics interview, Bloom proposed an alternative to the tradition of Eliot and Matthew Arnold—who anticipated some of Eliot's views—in academia, stating: "It's quite clearly the tradition that moves from [John] Ruskin through [Walter] Pater and [Oscar] Wilde that interests me and which I would certainly want to set up more as a model for the professorial or academic criticism of poetry than the Arnoldian, Eliotic line." Consistent with his critical preference, Bloom has edited an edition of Pater's Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, and he has also edited and written introductions for Selected Writings of Walter Pater and The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin.
Bloom links the Ruskin/Pater/Wilde tradition of criticism with the ancient Greco-Roman philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism when he told Moynihan that "there is an element of Stoic and indeed explicitly Epicurean mode of interpretation that does get into Pater very strongly, and before him does exist implicitly in Ruskin, and I would suppose that Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, and in this country, [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, who was a kind of intuitive Gnostic, are the major influences on my work." Bloom further contended that as an alternative to the mainstream of literary criticism descended from Plato and Aristotle, "Stoic and Epicurean models in terms of philosophy, and Gnostic and Kabbalistic models in terms of religion, which themselves owe a good deal I think to Stoic doctrines, are of more interest."
In addition to borrowing from Freud, Gnosticism, and the Kabbalah, Bloom invents vocabulary, structures, and interstructural relations that may challenge the general reader. The Anxiety of Influence asserts six "revisionary ratios," methods of misreading to which Bloom attaches specialized Greek names. In Contemporary Literature, Paul de Man asserted that "the main interest of The Anxiety of Influence, is not the literal theory of influence it contains but the structural interplay between the six types of misreading, the six ‘intricate evasions’ that govern the relationships between texts." "A Map of Misreading," noted Michael Wood in an article for the New York Review of Books, "adds six rhetorical tropes, six psychic defenses, six sets of imagery, and three movements of creation to Bloom's original six ratios of revision." Observing the use of invented and Kabbalistic terminology throughout Bloom's theoretical works, Helen Regueiro Elam in the Dictionary of Literary Biography stated: "Readers may feel hopelessly bewildered by this proliferation of terms, but for Bloom they constitute a basic vocabulary which, despite constant revisions and refinements, retains its parallels from text to text."
Several reviewers charge that Bloom's literary theory is excessively reductive. "In The Breaking of the Vessels [Bloom] says that his kind of reading ‘does not know a poem as being apart from the agon it enacts,’" noted Denis Donoghue in the Times Literary Supplement. The critic then asked: "If a reading doesn't know a poem as being apart from the agon it enacts, what prevents the reading from reducing the poem to that agon?" Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Christopher Ricks noted repetition in the arguments appearing in The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, and Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens, then declared, "Bloom had an idea; now the idea has him…. He now has nothing left to do but to say the same things about new contests and with more decibels." However, in a New Republic review of Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, Helen Vendler wrote: "Any collection of essays and addresses composed in the span of a few years by a single powerful mind will tend to return to the same questions, and to urge (even covertly) the same views."
Some critics have complained of a tendency toward assertion rather than exposition in Bloom's works. Discussing statements of influence between particular poems in A Map of Misreading, Yale Review critic Jonathan Culler said: "If Bloom were to consider how he knows these things, tell us the story of his formidable poetic perceptions, he would produce a far more valuable and instructive book." "Bloom hasn't validated his values, he has merely urged them," wrote Donoghue in his Times Literary Supplement article.
Bloom engages in his own theological revisionism in The Book of J, which presents the text of David Rosenberg's new translation of the "J" strand of the Bible—"J" for "Jehovah," an incorrect transliteration of "Yahweh," the "J"-text author's name for God—and Bloom's interpretation of the text. "The earliest known texts of the Hebrew Bible were not religious writings at all but a sublime work of literature, a comic masterpiece of ironic power," said Richard Bernstein in summary of Bloom's thesis in the New York Times Book Review. Bernstein further reported that Bloom suggests the "J" author was a court woman writing immediately after the reign of Solomon. Chicago Tribune critic Joseph Coates noted Bloom's assertion that later segments of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, traditionally ascribed to Moses, were revisions written "by priests and redactors who over a period of 600 years inflicted later forms of patriarchal Judaism on the work of a secular, and often quite bawdy, author." In his conclusion, Coates suggested that The Book of J is "restoring to Western literature a major author at the very beginning of the canon." According to Bloom, the grouping of texts into a canon is an extension of the agonistic action of literary criticism. Elam commented: "Canonization expresses the critic's own will-to-power over texts and is the most extreme form of literary revisionism."
Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection is a more personal book on a similar subject in which Bloom discusses contemporary spirituality and his own admitted Gnosticist beliefs. "While presenting an informative history of ideas and provocative cultural critique," according to Mark Taylor in the New York Times Book Review, "Omens of Millennium is, above all else, a spiritual autobiography." As Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Jonathan Kirsch wrote: "The whole point of Bloom's book is that the offerings of the so-called New Age—‘an endless saturnalia of ill-defined longings,’ as he defines it—are shallow and silly when compared to what the ancients knew." Bloom offers the teachings of the Gnostic tradition as an alternative to millenarian spiritual malaise, accompanied by glancing examples from his own life. Commenting on Bloom's disclosure of his struggle with depression in his thirties, Kirsch noted that Bloom "is apparently too courtly, too cerebral and perhaps too shy to engage in much baring of the soul." Instead, as Washington Post Book World critic Marina Warner noted, Bloom invokes the wisdom of ancient Zoroastrianism, early Christian Gnosticism, medieval Sufism, and Kabbalism "in order to create an antidote to the New Age." Praising the "trenchancy, verve and learning" of the book, Warner wrote that, "Omens of Millennium is born of despair, but it focuses throughout on possibility, with a true teacher's refusal to give up the job of stimulating and informing, no matter how restless the class or desolate the wasteland of the schoolyard outside."
In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Bloom focuses his attention on select writings of twenty-six authors, including Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett, whom he contends are among the most significant figures of the Western literary tradition. Concerned over the current underappreciation of serious reading and literary study among students and educators, Bloom laments, as quoted by Norman Fruman in the New York Times Book Review, that "we are destroying all intellectual and esthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of social justice." Fruman praised Bloom's effort as "a heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities," particularly Bloom's vehement opposition to "the School of Resentment" in which he corrals "Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians." Bloom is "supremely confident of his own esthetic judgment," according to Fruman, and "he takes little notice of the vagaries of individual taste or the pressure of cultural or national loyalties." Commenting on the tone of "sorrowful resignation" that permeates the book, Michael Dirda wrote in Washington Post Book World: "Such mournful authority is irresistible, and it is this unswerving defense of reading, of ‘hard’ reading, that transmutes The Western Canon into a work of power and plangency."
"Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is, simply, the book of a lifetime, the culmination of a career," wrote Frank McConnell in Commonweal. The book contains Bloom's views on Shakespeare's plays, which loosely argues the theory that Shakespeare invented the human personality. In this "series of brilliant, persuasive, highly idiosyncratic readings," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, Bloom presents the reader with, wrote Hugh Kenner in National Review, "a theme that each visit amplifies and deepens but cannot wholly clarify." To Bloom the most important Shakespearean characters are Falstaff and Hamlet. McConnell wrote: "Falstaff is … the very archetype of life in the moment, of consciousness as perpetual, minute-by-minute celebration of itself, and all it sees, for all the ill it sees…. Hamlet is … transcendence, aware to the point of pain of the world's complexity, and wanting nothing so much as to evade it all for the absoluteness of one's being." Delivering his case against the politicizing of college departments of English, Bloom "cheerfully calls himself a ‘wicked old aesthete’" related Donald Lyons in Commentary, as he dismisses feminist, revisionist, and structuralist theories imposed on Shakespeare's works. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times noted that, "indeed, this volume is best read as an old-fashioned humanistic commentary on Shakespeare's plays that gives us a renewed appreciation of the playwright's staggering achievement." McConnell wrote: "In a world where academic criticism is ever more aridly formalist and/or politically correct, ever less connected to the needs of human readers, this book is exhilaratingly old-fashioned, arguing … that we read poetry to save, or find, our lives." James Shapiro for the New York Times Book Review felt the work "marred by a compulsion to denigrate" Shakespeare's contemporaries, but admits that "the most exhilarating observations—and the best chapters are littered with them—have the quality of aphorisms." A critic for the Economist wrote that "what is most heartening about his book is the sheer joy, awe, and wonder that the plays still inspire in him after a lifetime of studying and teaching them."
How to Read and Why is Bloom's attempt to communicate to readers the best way to read. The book is broken into sections on short stories, poems, novels, and plays. Colin Walters in the Washington Times described the work as "a roundup of favorite reading treats accumulated over sixty years." "This book is a testament to Bloom's view that reading is above all a pleasurably therapeutic event," concluded a critic for Publishers Weekly, while Henry Carrigan in Library Journal described the book as an "apologia for the art of reading well."
Bloom's love of literature and wish to tell everyone about it has also extended to children. He has written a series of study guides for grade school children and up. These books cover authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and many, many more. Each volume in the series includes Bloom's essay "The Work in the Writer" and a different introduction written for each volume. Bloom also includes a brief biography of the author, discussion of the author's accomplishments, and, as noted by Susan D. Yutzey in Book Report, "an original critical essay that puts the author's works into cultural and historical perspective."
Despite his prolific writings for young adult readers, Bloom has not forgotten the sophisticated adult reader. In his 2002 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One HundredExemplary Creative Minds, he discusses his choice for the one hundred most influential writers in world history. Bloom's choices—among them William Shakespeare, John Milton, Homer, Ralph Ellison, Miguel Cervantes, and Leo Tolstoy—would not surprise those who have followed the educator's career or literary predilections. However, as noted by Jonathan Rose in the Europe Intelligence Wire, Genius includes "some provocative surprises." Rose went on to add: "You will wake up when he introduces you to Machade de Assis (a Brazilian zany in the tradition of Laurence Sterne) and Ea de Queriroz (a Portuguese satirist who ‘united Voltaire and Robert Louis Stevenson in a single body’)." Bloom begins his book by discussing genius and outlining how he has grouped the writers included, which is according to the ten divine attributes in the ancient Jewish text the Kabbalah. Each of the subsequent chapters focuses on one writer.
Writing in Book, Penelope Mesic found Genius to "have a lack of focus [that] contributes to a more serious deficiency: the absence of a point to be made." Mesic found the groupings based on the Kabbalah to "reflect not an underlying truth about these authors' works but rather Bloom's past scholarship and predilections." Booklist contributor Donna Seaman believed that the groupings worked, noting that "this makes for some wonderfully fresh and provocative juxtapositions, and for an elevating concentration on how each writer extends the path toward wisdom." Writing in the Library Journal, Shana C. Fair commented that "although the book is a delight to read, its real value lies in the author's ability to provoke the reader into thinking about literature, genius, and related topics."
With Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, Bloom returns to the subject that was featured in The Book of J: his assertion that the first true biblical texts, a portion of the Hebrew Bible, were written by a man he calls "J," and feature Yahweh, a sort of combination of man and God. Tracing this biblical strand, Bloom believes one eventually comes to what should be the true basis for religion, as opposed to either Christianity or Judaism. However, when the initial determinations were made to include certain scriptures in the Bible while discarding others, this segment of text was ultimately eliminated in favor of those that painted God in a more beneficent and less aggressive way. Bloom's book is not devoted to Yahweh alone, but actually begins with Jesus, and with an explanation of the differences between the Hebrew account and the New Testament account of Jesus' life. He separates Jesus and Jesus Christ as two distinct individuals, the first of whom was an actual man who lived and worked, but about whom very little is truly known. The second, however, is a mythological figure whom theologians created from a series of stories in order to provide the faithful with a figure on which to fix their hopes and desires for a better existence. Jonathan Rosen, in a review for the New York Times Book Review, commented that "in Bloom's account, Jesus, with his deep connection to the uncanny Yahweh, can seem like the last real Jew, rather than the first Christian." He went on to conclude: "The battle between the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible is a struggle over religious truth that goes to a core crisis in Western civilization, and in Bloom himself. It helps explain why, in Bloom's agonistic literary universe, literature, despite his genius for explaining it, can seem oddly irrelevant. It is religious truth that matters." Ray Olson, writing for Booklist, found the book "more personal than argumentative and more literary than religious criticism."
American Religious Poems, which Bloom edited along with Jesse Zuba, is a collection of poetry that he believes serves as a sort of spiritual hymnal for the nation. Along with his mainstream literary criticism, Bloom has always maintained an interest in religion and religious writings, having written and edited numerous books on the subject. Here, however, he does not refer to religious texts, but to the secular writings of some of America's most prominent nineteenth-century poets known for their work on the inner life: Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. Bloom suggests that there is a spiritual quality in the poetry of these three greats, as well as that of Hart Crane, who was their stylistic descendent. He goes on to consider the three poets as a sort of holy trinity, whose work not only brought joy, awe, and reflection to the readers of the day, but also continued to inspire and affect the writing of generations of poets and prose writers alike, continuing into modern-day literary efforts. Bloom and Zuba have included these literary acolytes as well, offering readers the chance to see how the trinity of poetry passed on their wisdom and their talent and their ways of looking at the world around them. Mark Doty, in a review for O, the Oprah Magazine, referred to the volume as "a big, juicy collection" that is "compelling." Marilynne Robinson, reviewing Bloom's effort for Poetry, remarked that "aside from the rather perfunctory selection of early writing and a few songs and hymns that seem to have been chosen for their familiarity rather than for their interest as poetry, most of the work collected here is thoughtful and sophisticated by any standard. Much of it would seem ‘religious’ only in a context that encouraged the reader to consider it in this light. Yet in this light it is indeed religious."
Fallen Angels is Bloom's response to the popularity of angels in current pop culture and literature. He takes his readers on a tour of angels throughout history, focusing in particular on the fallen angel and the different ways it has been represented in literature and other cultural mediums through the centuries, covering everything from Tanakh to Angels in America. The slim book includes illustrations of various paintings, illuminated letters, and sketches of angels. Bloom also concentrates his efforts on more cultural examples of fallen angels and avoids reference to theological examples that might have been far more plentiful. Writing for the Library Journal, David B. Levy found that, "for what it sets out to do, … Bloom's book succeeds. A delightful read." June Sawyers, reviewing the work for Booklist, found it to be "erudite and entertaining," and also considered it to be "a bracing riposte to the run of precious angel books that glut the market." In a review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Nick Owchar wrote of Bloom: "What he gets at in this brief work is that by treating angels as different from us, we have lessened ourselves: We forget that angels ‘represent something that was ours.’"
Bloom's assertion that literary activity is a struggle against past and future literary actions has, throughout his career, provided a controversial and provocative alternative to the widely followed traditional schools of criticism. "Since the publication of The Anxiety of Influence, it has been impossible to discuss theories of influence and tradition without reference to Bloom," wrote Elam. Bloom has, in fact, become an outcast among many of his colleagues due to his idiosyncratic and independent approach, explained Larissa Macfarquhar in the New Yorker. For Bloom's part, he does not see himself in the role of literary curmudgeon: he explained that while he still believes "Shakespeare is still the best of all writers…. I also enormously admire such current authors as Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy among novelists, John Ashbery the poet, and Tony Kushner the dramatist."
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
BOOKS
Allen, Graham, Harold Bloom: Poetics of Conflict, Harvester Wheatsheaf (New York, NY), 1994.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 24, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.
De Bolla, Peter, Harold Bloom: Toward Historical Rhetorics, Routledge (New York, NY), 1988.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 67: Modern American Critics since 1955, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.
Eliot, T.S., Selected Essays, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1964.
Fite, David, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1985.
Lentricchia, Frank, After the New Criticism, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1974.
Mileur, Jean-Pierre, Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1985.
Moynihan, Robert, A Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man, Archon (Hamden, CN), 1986.
Saurberg, Lars Ole, Versions of the Past—Visions of the Future: The Canonical in the Criticism of T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.
Scherr, Barry J., D.H. Lawrence's Response to Plato: A Bloomian Interpretation, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1995.
PERIODICALS
Book, November-December, 2002, Penelope Mesic, review of Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, p. 79.
Booklist, September 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Genius, p. 2; October 1, 2006, Ray Olson, review of American Religious Poems, p. 24; October 1, 2007, June Sawyers, review of Fallen Angels, p. 24.
Book Report, May-June, 2002, Theresa Micelson, "Bloom's Major Novelists," p. 67; September-October, 2002, Susan D. Yutzey, "Bloom's Bio Critiques," p. 70.
Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1990, Joseph Coates, review of The Book of J.
Commentary, April, 1999, Donald Lyons, review of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 53.
Commonweal, Frank McConnell, review of Shakespeare, p. 20.
Diacritics, fall, 1983, Robert Moynihan, interview with Harold Bloom.
Economist, February 6, 1999, "Good Will Shakespeare," p. 89.
Europe Intelligence Wire, October 26, 2002, Jonathan Rose, review of Genius.
Library Journal, October 1, 1998, Neal Wyatt, review of Shakespeare, p. 84; May 1, 2000, Henry Carrigan, review of How to Read and Why, p. 111; September 15, 2002, Shana C. Fair, review of Genius, p. 62; December 1, 2007, David B. Levy, review of Fallen Angels, p. 123.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 15, 1996, Jonathan Kirsch, review of Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection, p. 6; October 28, 2007, Nick Owchar, review of Fallen Angels.
National Review, Hugh Kenner, review of Shakespeare, p. 51.
New Criterion, December, 1998, Paul Dean, review of Shakespeare, p. 77.
New Republic, February 17, 1982, Helen Vendler, review of Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism.
New Statesman, March 12, 1999, Terence Hawkes, review of Shakespeare, p. 45.
New Yorker, September 30, 2002, Larissa Macfarquhar, "The Prophet of Decline."
New York Review of Books, April 17, 1975, Michael Wood, review of A Map of Misreading; February 19, 1976.
New York Times, October 24, 1990, Richard Bernstein, review of The Book of J; October 17, 1994, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, p. B2; October 27, 1998, Michiko Kakutani, "Shakespeare: The Vast Shakespearean Drama, with All People as Players," p. E1.
New York Times Book Review, March 14, 1976, Christopher Ricks, review of Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens; October 9, 1994, Norman Fruman, review of The Western Canon, p. 9; September 8, 1996, Mark Taylor, review of Omens of Millennium, p. 11; November 1, 1998, James Shapiro, "Soul of the Age," p. 8; November 27, 2005, Jonathan Rosen, "So Who Is King of the Jews?"
New York Times Magazine, September 25, 1994, Adam Begley, "Colossus among Critics," p. 32.
O, the Oprah Magazine, October, 2006, Mark Doty, review of American Religious Poems, p. 240.
Poetry, May, 2007, Marilynne Robinson, "That Highest Candle," p. 130.
Publishers Weekly, September 14, 1998, review of Shakespeare, p. 56; May 8, 2000, review of How to Read and Why, p. 212.
Times Literary Supplement, July 30, 1982, Denis Donoghue, review of The Breaking of the Vessels.
Washington Post Book World, September 25, 1994, Michael Dirda, review of The Western Canon, p. 1; September 15, 1996, Marina Warner, review of Omens of Millennium, p. 11.
Washington Times, June 18, 2000, Colin Walters, "When the Book's the Thing," p. 6; April 6, 2003, David Veington, review of Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, p. B08.
Yale Review, October, 1975, Jonathan Culler, review of A Map of Misreading.
ONLINE
Atlantic Unbound,http://www.theatlantic.com/ (July 16, 2003), Jennie Rothenberg, interview with Bloom.