Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who championed and defended the Western canon in an outpouring of influential books that appeared not only on college syllabuses but also — unusual for an academic — on best-seller lists, died on Monday October 14 2019 at a hospital in New Haven. He was 89. His death was confirmed by his wife, Jeanne Bloom, who said he taught his last class at Yale University on Thursday. Professor Bloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Harold Bloom was born on July 11, 1930, in the East Bronx, into an Orthodox Jewish household. When he graduated from Cornell in 1951, his teachers insisted that he go to another institution for graduate school. Professor Bloom was accepted at Yale. Professor Bloom broke with the Yale English department completely in 1977. He was appointed De Vane professor of humanities and eventually Sterling professor of the humanities, the highest academic rank at Yale, in effect becoming a department unto himself. He had married Jeanne Gould in 1958. In addition to his wife, Professor Bloom is survived by two sons, Daniel and David.