Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic, author of over forty books, and Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 until his death. Born in the Bronx to Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents, Bloom earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1955 and became a leading voice in literary studies through his emphasis on aesthetic value and the struggles of poetic creation.

Bloom's most influential work, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), proposed that strong poets achieve originality by swerving from or misreading their predecessors in a process driven by psychic rivalry, outlining six "revisionary ratios" that describe this agonistic dynamic. In The Western Canon (1994), he robustly defended the enduring value of works by authors like Shakespeare, Dante, and Chaucer against what he termed the "School of Resentment"—critiques rooted in gender, race, or Marxism that prioritize ideology over literary strength. His Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) argued that Shakespeare's characters pioneered inwardness and personality, shaping modern consciousness more profoundly than any other writer.

Harold Bloom was born on July 11, 1930, in the East Bronx neighborhood of New York City, into an Orthodox Jewish household headed by Eastern European immigrants. He was the youngest of five children; his father, William, worked as a garment manufacturer after emigrating from Odessa, Ukraine, while his mother, Paula, was a homemaker originally from near Brest Litovsk in present-day Belarus. Yiddish served as Bloom's first language in the family home, where he taught himself to read it by age three and Hebrew soon after, with English acquired later in childhood.