44 Facts About Harold Bloom

1.

Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University.

2.

Harold Bloom edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm.

3.

Harold Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

4.

Harold Bloom was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.

5.

Harold Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literary departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment".

6.

Harold Bloom was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

7.

Harold Bloom was born in New York City on July 11,1930, the son of Paula and William Harold Bloom.

8.

Harold Bloom lived in the Bronx at 1410 Grand Concourse.

9.

Harold Bloom was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a Yiddish-speaking household, where he learned literary Hebrew; he learned English at the age of six.

10.

Harold Bloom's father, a garment worker, was born in Odessa and his Lithuanian Jewish mother, a homemaker, near Brest Litovsk in what is today Belarus.

11.

Harold Bloom had three older sisters and an older brother; he was the last living sibling.

12.

Harold Bloom went to the Bronx High School of Science, where his grades were poor but his standardized-test scores were high.

13.

Several years later Harold Bloom dedicated his book The Anxiety of Influence to Wimsatt.

14.

Harold Bloom was a member of the Yale English Department from 1955 to 2019, teaching his final class four days before his death.

15.

From 1988 to 2004, Harold Bloom was Berg Professor of English at New York University while maintaining his position at Yale.

16.

Fond of endearments, Harold Bloom addressed both male and female students and friends as "my dear".

17.

Harold Bloom was the subject of a 1990 article in GQ titled "Harold Bloom in Love", which accused him of having affairs with female graduate students.

18.

Harold Bloom died at a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, on October 14,2019.

19.

Harold Bloom had a contentious approach: his first book, Shelley's Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of the poet.

20.

Harold Bloom attempted to trace the psychological process by which poets broke free from their precursors to achieve their own poetic visions.

21.

Harold Bloom described this process in terms of a sequence of "revisionary ratios", through which strong poets pass in the course of their careers.

22.

Figures of Capable Imagination collected odd pieces Harold Bloom had written in the process of composing his "influence" books.

23.

Harold Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the 1970s and '80s, and penned little thereafter that did not invoke his ideas about influence.

24.

Harold Bloom then entered a phase of what he called "religious criticism", beginning with Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present.

25.

Later, Harold Bloom said that the speculations did not go far enough, and perhaps he should have identified J with the Biblical Bathsheba.

26.

Harold Bloom elsewhere predicted that the Mormon and Pentecostal strains of American Christianity would overtake mainstream Protestant divisions in popularity in the next few decades.

27.

The Western Canon, a survey of the major literary works of Europe and the Americas since the 14th century, focuses on 26 works Harold Bloom considers sublime and representative of their nations and of the Western canon.

28.

Harold Bloom asserted that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the goal of improving one's society held by "forces of resentment".

29.

Harold Bloom said that he made the list off the top of his head at his editor's request, and that he did not stand by it.

30.

Harold Bloom had a deep appreciation for William Shakespeare, considering him the supreme center of the Western canon.

31.

The first edition of The Anxiety of Influence almost completely avoided Shakespeare, whom Harold Bloom then considered barely touched by the psychological drama of anxiety.

32.

Harold Bloom consolidated his work on the Western canon with the publication of How to Read and Why and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.

33.

Hamlet: Poem Unlimited is an amendment to Shakespeare: Invention of the Human written after Harold Bloom decided the chapter on Hamlet in the earlier book had been too focused on the textual question of the Ur-Hamlet to cover his most central thoughts on the play itself.

34.

Harold Bloom took part in Paul Festa's 2006 documentary Apparition of the Eternal Church.

35.

Harold Bloom began a book under the working title Living Labyrinth, centering on Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, which was published as The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life.

36.

In July 2011, after the publication of The Anatomy of Influence and after finishing work on The Shadow of a Great Rock, Harold Bloom was working on three further projects:.

37.

In 1986, Harold Bloom credited Northrop Frye as his nearest precursor.

38.

Harold Bloom called Crowley's Little, Big "a neglected masterpiece" and "the most enchanting twentieth-century book I know".

39.

Harold Bloom wrote the afterword to a 40th-anniversary edition of the novel.

40.

Shortly before his death, Harold Bloom expressed admiration for the works of Joshua Cohen, William Giraldi, and Nell Freudenberger.

41.

In Kabbalah and Criticism, Harold Bloom identified Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets.

42.

Harold Bloom listed Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets and the best living American poet after Ashbery's death.

43.

Harold Bloom's work has drawn polarized responses, even among established literary scholars.

44.

Harold Bloom was called "probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States" and "America's best-known man of letters".