Harold Bloom

"Harold Bloom, named "The indispensible critic" by the New York Review of Books, returns with a definitive yet personal book on twelve American writers upon whose work he believes the American canon is built. While his references to American writers are wide-ranging, he focuses on twelve: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, William...

Shakespeare invented characters in a new kind of way. He not only gave them personality and depth, he gave them life. Not a life that went simply from point to point, but one that developed rather than unfolded. In so doing, Shakespeare created characters with whom everyone can identify, whether the characters were kings and queens or fools and merchants. Renowned Shakespearian scholar Professor Harold Bloom presents Shakespeare's seven major tragedies...

The last book written by the most famous literary critic of his generation, on the sustaining power of poetry This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death—completed days before Harold Bloom died—shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called “a universe of death.” Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life’s troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him...

Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or "J") writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Illiad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work...

King Lear is perhaps the most poignant character in literature. The aged, abused monarch is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as...