The Political Truths of Literary Friendship
Key takeaways
- Get audio access with any FP subscription.
- The popular literary critic earned his renown for his erudition as a self-described “monster of reading” of literary texts.
- That erudition is now plentifully on offer in Heather Cass White’s painstakingly edited The Man Who Read Everything.
Get audio access with any FP subscription.
Harold Bloom was anything but a policymaker. The popular literary critic earned his renown for his erudition as a self-described “monster of reading” of literary texts. (Bloom was reputed to be able to consume hundreds of pages an hour and could purportedly recite the over 10,000 lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and untold volumes of British poetry.)
That erudition is now plentifully on offer in Heather Cass White’s painstakingly edited The Man Who Read Everything. The book compiles Bloom’s literary correspondence with Alvin Feinman (1954-1963), Northrop Frye (1959-1969), John Hollander (1965-1976), A.R. Ammons (1969-1971), John Ashbery (1971-2015), James Merrill (1976-1979), Henri Cole (1997-2012), and Ursula K. Le Guin (2017-2018). In White’s eight-chapter volume, we see the inimitable Bloom backstage, the man behind epic intellectual debates that engulfed teaching the academic humanities during the second half of the 20th century.