Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American professor and literary critic.

Judgments concerning recent writers

Bloom's association with the Western canon has provoked a substantial amount of interest in his opinion concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers.

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In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: "Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett. He’s certainly the most authentic." Beckett died in 1989, and Bloom has not suggested who occupies that position now.

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Concerning British writers: "Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active," and "no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Murdoch's eminence." Since Murdoch's death, Bloom has expressed admiration for novelists such as John Banville, Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, and A. S. Byatt.

Related Topics:
Geoffrey Hill - Murdoch - Murdoch - John Banville - Peter Ackroyd - Will Self - A. S. Byatt

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In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, he named Portuguese writer José Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today," and "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre."

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Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 "there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise." Claiming "they write the Style of our Age, each has composed canonical works," he identified them as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. He named their strongest works as Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater, Blood Meridian, and Underworld. He has also praised fantasy writer John Crowley as these writers' equal -- especially his novel Little, Big.

Related Topics:
Thomas Pynchon - Philip Roth - Cormac McCarthy - Don DeLillo - Gravity's Rainbow - Mason & Dixon - American Pastoral - Sabbath's Theater - Blood Meridian - Underworld - John Crowley - Little, Big

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In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975) he identified Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s he regularly named A.R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he has lately come to identify Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He has expressed great admiration for the Canadian poet Anne Carson, particularly her verse novel Autobiography of Red. Bloom also lists African American Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets.

Related Topics:
Robert Penn Warren - James Merrill - John Ashbery - Elizabeth Bishop - A.R. Ammons - Henri Cole - Anne Carson - Jay Wright

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