Harold Bloom was born July 11, 1930, in the East Bronx, into an Orthodox Jewish household. “He was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma.” “Beautiful, brilliant students surrounded him,” she wrote. (“A disgusting piece of character assassination,” he was quoted as telling Begley in The Times Magazine.) And in a 2004 article in New York magazine, writer Naomi Wolf wrote that he had once put his hand on her inner thigh when she was an undergraduate student. In 1990, GQ magazine, in an article titled “Bloom in Love,” portrayed him as having had intimate entanglements with female graduate students.

The spotlight he commanded as a powerful cultural figure did not always flatter him. Among his other bestsellers were his magnum opus “The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages,” published in 1994, and “How to Read and Why” (2000). “The Book of J” became a bestseller.Įntanglements Bloom was widely regarded as the most popular literary critic in America (an encomium he might have considered faint praise). The analogy to divinity worked both ways: In “The Book of J” (1990), Bloom challenged most existing biblical scholarship by suggesting that even the Judeo-Christian God was a literary character - invented by a woman, no less, who may have lived in the court of King Solomon and who wrote sections of the first five books of the Old Testament. “He is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century - and the most protean,” Sam Tanenhaus wrote in 2011 in The New York Times Book Review, of which he was the editor at the time, “a singular breed of scholar-teacher-critic-prose-poet-pamphleteer.” Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the western giants such as Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka - all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out - over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as often betraying literature’s essential purpose. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. His death was confirmed by his wife, Jeanne Bloom, who said he taught his last class at Yale University on Thursday.īloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who championed and defended the western canon in an outpouring of influential books that appeared not only on college syllabuses but also on bestseller lists, died on Monday at a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut.

Bloom the western canon