Bloom, Harold

Related Category: American Literature: Biographies

1930–, American literary critic and scholar, b. New York City. The son of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia, educated at Cornell (B.A., 1951) and Yale Univ. (Ph.D., 1955), the distinguished critic, author, and academic is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York Univ. He has written more than 20 books and edited or written the introductions for some 400 other volumes. One of his best-known works, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), postulates a titanic Oedipal struggle in which great writers interpret and revolt against their literary fathers, a theme developed in A Map of Misreading (1974), Poetry and Repression (1976), and Agon (1982).

Bloom has also written studies of many individual authors, e.g., Shelley (1959), Blake (1963), Yeats (1970), Wallace Stevens (1977), and Shakespeare (1998). His wide-ranging literary concerns are represented in The Western Canon (1994), in which Bloom analyzes the works of 26 great masters; in How to Read and Why (2000), in which he presents a manual for literary enjoyment and enlightenment; and in Genius (2002), in which he explores the accomplishments of 100 great writers. His interest in religious and scriptural questions is apparent in such works as Ruin the Sacred Truths (1988), The Book of J (1990), in which he posits that a woman wrote part of the biblical Pentateuch, The American Religion (1992), and Jesus and Yahweh (2005). In addition to many academic and literary honors, Bloom was awarded a 1985 MacArthur fellowship.