Professor Harold Bloom:  July 11, 1930 -October 14, 2019

He was likely, no, he must have been, the most knowledgeable Shakespeare Scholar on the planet.

(See Shakespeare’s Literary Favorite Click Here) 

An American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities and English at Yale University. He wrote more than forty books, including twenty books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel.  

Bloom considered Shakespeare the ultimate center of the Western canon and even said he was only a parody of Falstaff.” (See Falstaff Review Click Here) The pictures used to portray Falstaff do seem to resemble Bloom.  

Bloom's theory was that people tend ultimately to be either more Hamlet (see Hamlet review Click Here), “an abyss, a chaos of virtual nothingness,” or Falstaff, overflowing with vitality and endless laughter, for whom “the self is everything. “

His book "Shakespeare The Invention of the Human" (see review click here) says that Shakespeare's vocabulary of 22,000 words is so infinite that it proves he knew pretty much everything there is to tell about humankind. That he, therefore, “invented the human.”

In an interview published in 1995, Bloom reflected on the great authors of the Western world, stating: "We have to read Shakespeare, and we have to study Shakespeare. We have to study Dante. We have to read Chaucer. We have to read Cervantes. We have to read the Bible, at least the King James Bible. We have to read certain authors.… They provide an intellectual; I dare say, the spiritual value that has nothing to do with organized religion or the history of institutional belief. They remind us in every sense of reminding us. They do not only tell us things that we have forgotten, but they tell us things we couldn’t possibly know without them, and they reform our minds. They make our minds stronger. They make us more vital."

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Bloom Categories Include

20th & 21st Century Educators, 20th & 21st Century American Writers, American Literary Critics, New York University Faculty, Yale Sterling Professor, Shakespearean Scholars, Yale University Faculty, Jewish Scholars, Jewish American Academics, Critics of Postmodernism,

How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom

In How to Read and Why Harold Bloom sets out a list of books that he believes can instill in one a life-long love of aesthetically and intellectually great literature.