Our foremost literary critic on our most essential writers, from
Emerson and Whitman to Hurston and Ellison, from Faulkner and O'Connor
to Ursula K. LeGuin and Philip Roth.
No critic has better understood the ways writers influence one
another--how literary traditions are made--and no writer has helped
readers understand this better, than Harold Bloom. Over the course of a
remarkable sixty-year career, in such bestselling books as The Western
Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and How to Read and
Why, Bloom brought enormous insight and infectious enthusiasm to the
great writers of the Western tradition, from Shakespeare and Cervantes
to the British Romantics and the Russian masters. Now, for the first
time, comes a collection of his brilliant writings about the American
tradition, the ultimate guide to our nation's literature.
Assembled with David Mikics (Slow Reading in a Hurried Age), this
unprecedented collection gathers five decades' worth of Bloom's
writings-- much of it hard to find and long unavailable--including
essays, occasional pieces, and introductions as well as excerpts from
his books. It offers deep readings of 47 essential American writers,
reflecting on the surprising ways they have influenced each other across
more than two centuries. The story it tells, of American literature as a
recurring artistic struggle for selfhood, speaks to the passion and
power of the American spirit.
All of the visionary American writers who have long preoccupied
Bloom―Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville, and Dickinson,
Faulkner, Crane, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop―make their appearance in
The American Canon, along with Hemingway, James, O'Connor, Ellison,
Hurston, Le Guin, Ashbery and many others. Bloom's passion for these
classic writers is contagious, and he reminds readers how they have
shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be better
versions of ourselves. Bloom, Mikics writes, "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."
For readers who want to deepen their appreciation of American
literature, there's no better place to start than The American Canon.
