Research Catalog

Title

The American canon : literary genius from Emerson to Pynchon / Harold Bloom ; edited by David Mikics.

Author

Bloom, Harold

Publication

• New York, N.Y. : The Library of America, [2019]
• ©2019

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Mikics, David, 1961-

Description

viii, 426 pages; 24 cm

Summary

"Harold Bloom is our greatest living 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 such best-selling books as The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he transformed the way we look at the masterworks of western literature. Now, in the first collection devoted to his illuminating writings specifically on American literature, Bloom reflects on the surprising ways American writers have influenced each other across more than two centuries. The American Canon gathers five decades of Bloom's essays, occasional pieces, and introductions as well as excerpts from several of his books, weaving them together into an unrivaled tour of the great American bookshelf. Always a champion of aesthetic power, Bloom tells the story of our national literature in terms of artistic struggle against powerful predecessors and the American thirst for selfhood. All of the visionary American writers who have long preoccupied Bloom--Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville, and Dickinson, Faulkner, Crane, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop--are here, along with Hemingway, James, O'Connor, Ellison, Hurston, LeGuin, Ashbery and many others. Bloom's enthusiasm for these American geniuses is contagious, and he reminds us how these writers have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be yet better versions of ourselves."--Amazon.

Subjects

• American literature
• Authors, American
• Literary criticism
• American literature > 19th century > History and criticism
• American literature > History and criticism
• 1800-1999
• American literature > 20th century > History and criticism
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882 > Criticism and interpretation
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Pynchon, Thomas > Criticism and interpretation

Genre/Form

• Literary criticism.
• Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Note

• "Five decades of writing on American literature"--Jacket.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages [425]-426).

Contents

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).

Call Number

JFE 20-2280

ISBN

• 9781598536409
• 1598536400

LCCN

2019944549

OCLC

1083224589

Author

Bloom, Harold, author.

Title

The American canon : literary genius from Emerson to Pynchon / Harold Bloom ; edited by David Mikics.

Publisher

New York, N.Y. : The Library of America, [2019]

Copyright Date

©2019

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages [425]-426).

Chronological Term

1800-1999

Added Author

Mikics, David, 1961- editor.

Research Call Number

JFE 20-2280