Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) in New York, NY. Son of William and Paul (Lev) Bloom; married Jeanne Gould, 1958; children: Daniel Jacob, David Moses. Education: Cornell University, B.A., 1951; Yale University, Ph. D., 1955.
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A literary critic best known for defending the Western canon, which amounted to resisting the Post-Colonialism, Feminist and Multi-Culturalism movements in academic literary criticism.
Bloom began his career by defending the reputations of the High Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century against neo-Christian critics influenced by such writers as T.S. Eliot.
After a personal crisis in the late sixties, Bloom became deeply interested in the ancient religious tradition of Gnosticism. Influenced by Gnosticism, he began a series of books that focussed on the way in which poets struggled to create their own individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the previous poets who inspired them to write. Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the seventies and eighties, which has crept into everything he has written since.
Beginning with The Book of J in 1990, Bloom began a series of miscellaneous works that reached out to a more popular audience. The publicity surrounding The Western Canon turned him into something of a celebrity. His critical work is often associated with Camille Paglia's.
Bloom's association with the Western canon has provoked a substantial amount of interest in his opinon concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers.
In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: "Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett. He’s certainly the most authentic." Beckett died in 1989, and Bloom has not suggested who occupies that position now.
More recently, he has named Portugeuse Jose Saramago as "the greatest living novelist."
Concerning British writers: "Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active," and "no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of [Iris] Murdoch's eminence."
Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 "there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise" and identified them as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo. In the 1980s he named Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill and John Ashberry as the most important Amerian poets, and in the 1990s seems to have added A.R. Ammons to that list. Only Ashberry is alive as of 2003.
Judgements concerning the most recent writers
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