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Harold Bloom: The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon

Edited by David Mikics

Our foremost literary critic celebrates the American pantheon of great writers from Emerson and Whitman, to Hurston and Ellison, to Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon

“Harold Bloom has been engaged for decades in an ongoing masterpiece of criticism about American literature. Now, for the first time, his ‘American project’ has been brought together in one place, in this definitive collection.” —David Yaffe

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Video Harold Bloom and the American Canon from Emerson to Toni Morrison
December 28, 2020

News The Ursula K. Le Guin–Harold Bloom connection, and other news for Le Guin’s 90th birthday
November 13, 2019

Interviews Harold Bloom’s The American Canon: “He is speaking directly to you about his passions”
November 12, 2019

Harold Bloom was our greatest student of literature, “a colossus among critics” (The New York Times) and a “master entertainer” (Newsweek). Over the course of a remarkable career spanning more than half a century, in his landmark studies The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, and in such best-selling books as The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom transformed the way we look at the masterworks of western literature. Now comes a collection that promises to do the same for American literature, revealing the surprising ways forty-seven essential American writers have influenced each other across more than two centuries.

Assembled by David Mikics (Slow Reading in a Hurried Age), this unprecedented collection gathers five decades of writing—much of it hard to find and long unavailable—woven together into a compelling portrait of American literary genius. Always a champion of visionary power, Bloom tells the story of our national literature in terms of Emerson’s inescapable influence on all subsequent American authors and the peculiarly American thirst for the fully awakened self. “Emerson bet the American house (as it were) on self-reliance,” Bloom writes. A mixed inheritance, it has given us Moby-Dick and Wallace Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn,” but it can also lead to extremism. “Contemporary America is too dangerous to be laughed away,” Bloom observes, “and I turn to its most powerful writers in order to see if we remain coherent enough for imaginative comprehension.”

Bloom’s enthusiasm for American literature is contagious. He reminds us how our most indispensable writers have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be better versions of ourselves. As Mikics writes, Bloom “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.”

Harold Bloom (1930–2019) was Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, The American Religion, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, and most recently Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism. He was the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Catalonia International Prize, and Mexico’s Alfonso Reyes International Prize.

David Mikics is the author, most recently, of Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life into Art and Slow Reading in a Hurried Age, and editor of The Annotated Emerson. His writing has appeared in Tablet, The Nation, and The New York Times.

This special publication features full-cloth case, acid-free paper, and a unique design with specifications differing from those of Library of America series titles.
News & Views

Video Harold Bloom and the American Canon from Emerson to Toni Morrison
December 28, 2020

News The Ursula K. Le Guin–Harold Bloom connection, and other news for Le Guin’s 90th birthday
November 13, 2019

Interviews Harold Bloom’s The American Canon: “He is speaking directly to you about his passions”
November 12, 2019

News He “lived and breathed literature”—Library of America remembers Harold Bloom, 1930–2019
November 5, 2019
Table of Contents

Preface by David Mikics
Introduction by David Mikics

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
Herman Melville (1819–1891)
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Mark Twain (1835–1910)
Henry James (1843–1916)
Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
Willa Cather (1873–1947)
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
Marianne Moore (1887–1972)
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)
Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953)
Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
William Faulkner (1897–1962)
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
Hart Crane (1899–1932)
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
Nathanael West (1903–1940)
Eudora Welty (1909–2001)
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
Tennessee Williams (1911–1983)
Ralph Ellison (1913–1994)
Robert Hayden (1913–1980)
Carson McCullers (1917–1967)
James Baldwin (1924–1987)
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
James Merrill (1926–1995)
A. R. Ammons (1926–2001), John Ashbery (1927–2017), W. S. Merwin (1927–2019)
Edward Albee (1928–2016)
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018)
Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
Philip Roth (1933–2018)
Cormac McCarthy (b. 1933)
Jay Wright (b. 1934)
Don DeLillo (b. 1936)
Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-640-9 435 pages

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