Redeeming Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom, the greatest literary critic of his age! Look on his works, ye Mighty, and despair: by the end of his long, super-contemplative and rather oddball life, he’d published almost 50 original books, edited hundreds of critical works in his role as general editor at Chelsea House Publishers (a job he undertook to support a disabled son), and read untold millions, nay, billions of words so that you and I wouldn’t have to. And now we have the first published volume of Bloom’s correspondence, The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom, which may prove the tip of a pretty massive iceberg — if, that is, enough readers remain in the world to support such a project. Six years after Bloom’s death, and deeper still into an all-screens, post-literate age, he is arguably best remembered for a single phrase — “the anxiety of influence” — and for having allegedly put his hand on Naomi Wolf’s inner thigh.