As Mikics writes, Bloom “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.”
He reminds us how our most indispensable writers have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be better versions of ourselves. “Contemporary America is too dangerous to be laughed away,” Bloom observes, “and I turn to its most powerful writers in order to see if we remain coherent enough for imaginative comprehension.”īloom’s enthusiasm for American literature is contagious. A mixed inheritance, it has given us Moby-Dick and Wallace Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn,” but it can also lead to extremism. “Emerson bet the American house (as it were) on self-reliance,” Bloom writes.
Always a champion of visionary power, Bloom tells the story of our national literature in terms of Emerson’s inescapable influence on all subsequent American authors and the peculiarly American thirst for the fully awakened self. Now comes a collection that promises to do the same for American literature, revealing the surprising ways forty-seven essential American writers have influenced each other across more than two centuries.Īssembled by David Mikics ( Slow Reading in a Hurried Age), this unprecedented collection gathers five decades of writing-much of it hard to find and long unavailable-woven together into a compelling portrait of American literary genius. Over the course of a remarkable career spanning more than half a century, in his landmark studies The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, and in such best-selling books as The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom transformed the way we look at the masterworks of western literature. Harold Bloom was our greatest student of literature, “a colossus among critics” ( The New York Times) and a “master entertainer” ( Newsweek).
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