HAROLD BLOOM and ME

Harold Bloom(1930- ) published 25 books before this one,(1) and some of the books are almost as long as this 800 page tome. His terrific fluency, along with the unrivalled scope of his interests are among the reasons why he is probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States even at the age of 82.

Bloom is an American literary critic and is still Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University at the age of 82. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He has edited more than 600 hundred anthologies.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)Frank Kermode, Hip Gnosis, A review of Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by Harold Bloom, The Guardian, 12 October 2002.

You published your first book
and got married when I was in
the midget baseball and hockey
leagues in a small town by a big
lake in Ontario, going through a
9th and 10th grade school system
& curriculum, & into the newest
of the Abrahamic religions when(1)
everyone I knew was Catholic, Jew
or Protestant or nothing. They were
mostly nothing-at-all and there they
remained until the end of their days
due to the anathema of commitment
in anything except sport, fun, family,
jobs, friends, vast secular humanism.2

1 I joined the Baha’i Faith in 1959, the same year Bloom published his first book.
2 Bloom developed theories of poetic influence, marked by the publication of The Anxiety of Influence (1973) which he started writing in my first year as a professional teacher: 1967. These theories dominated his writing for a decade until the 1980s.

He began to focus on what he called "religious criticism" in the 1980s in books such as The Book of J (1990) and The American Religion (1992). He says he is a gnostic Jew and a product of Yiddish culture. He also says that he can't understand a Yahweh, or a God, who could be all-powerful and all-knowing and still allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia.

Ron Price 25 June 2012