The Man Who Read Everything
The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom, Edited by Heather Cass White
(amazon)Harold Bloom (View Bio)
Hardcover: Yale University Press, 2026.
This selection of the lively letters between one of the world’s greatest literary critics and the poets, novelists, and scholars he most admired brings together Harold Bloom’s letters to and from eight of his favorite contemporary writers. Heather Cass White provides an intimate view of one of the most famous literary critics of the last century. In correspondence with Alvin Feinman, Northrop Frye, A. R. Ammons, John Hollander, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Henri Cole, and Ursula K. Le Guin, we see Bloom developing his groundbreaking theory of poetic influence, transforming himself into a public intellectual, and reckoning with the meaning of his own legacy.
While Bloom’s public persona was oracular, sure, and often combative, his letters are inquiring and provisional, revealing his overarching obsession with good writing. The presence of love, as the letters show, was always vital to how Bloom worked as a reader. Filled with delightful anecdotes and poignant observations, these letters—many of them published here for the first time—offer a new window onto twentieth-century letters and Bloom’s long and illustrious career.
"It took time for Harold Bloom (1930-2019), the imperious, looming and convivial scholar and literary critic, to decipher his calling. “Lord knows what I am,” he wrote to the poet and Yale English department colleague John Hollander in 1975. (They addressed each other, in their merry letters, as “Foo” or “Foofy” or “Foofooismus.”) “Not a poet, critic, scholar, historian, psychoanalyst, philosopher or theosophist — but a worthless mélange of the gang of it.” It’s hard to overstate the influence Bloom had on American letters in the latter half of the 20th century. Despite his detractors — his tastes leaned too heavily white and male for many — no literary critic since has matched his combination of range, productivity, commercial success, academic prestige and notoriety. His books, The Western Canon (1994) among them, became best sellers and ignited intellectual brush fires that still smolder today.... A new book of Bloom’s letters, The Man Who Read Everything, is out now. It’s terrific from first to last, and is, as he liked to put it, quite up-cheering. While the letters that have been chosen are, intentionally, more about his work than his life, they put on display an earthier, less formal side of his intellect. A larger and more comprehensive volume of his letters is certain to someday appear, but this is a more-than-pleasant stopgap. It is an ideally slim book. The Man Who Read Everything, limits itself to eight of Bloom’s correspondents: Hollander, John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, James Merrill, Henri Cole, Ursula K. Le Guin and Alvin Feinman, as well as the critic Northrop Frye. He first met many of these writers after he’d dropped them an ardent fan letter — usually when he was preparing to write about or teach their work. It’s worth mentioning this book’s editor, Heather Cass White, a professor of English at the University of Alabama and a former student of Bloom’s. This book is well made, so much so that I ordered White’s own memoir about her reading. You feel you are in good hands from the start. Her introduction is exemplary, brisk without being hurried: It’s packed with exactly the information a reader needs before entering. Her footnotes, too, are agile. White had to search for Bloom’s papers in his messy, book-strewn attic office. He tended to stick letters and other things inside books, so she had to shake many of them out." — Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review (Read the full review)
"It was easy to admire Harold Bloom. One of the most distinguished American literary critics, he always gave the impression of having read anything and everything by the great and the good. Over the course of a 60-year writing career, he produced a steady stream of books that showcased the scope of his reading and illustrated the merits of a range of novelists, poets, playwrights, and thinkers. The best of his books revolved around grandiose claims that were followed by cogent, convincing arguments.... A different, posthumous Bloom offering now sees the light of day. The Man Who Read Everything is a collection of Bloom’s literary letters. The title is silly: those who remember Bloom’s scathing takedowns of Stephen King (“immensely inadequate”) and the first Harry Potter book (“slop”) will know he didn’t waste his time reading more than he had to of what he considered inferior literature. However, the contents are fascinating, for they allow us a valuable glimpse into how this true one-off worked, thought, and communicated with those whose writing he held in high esteem." — Malcolm Forbes, Washington Examiner (Read the full review)
"It is clear that the poets valued Bloom as a critic and a person.... In her informative introduction, Ms. White, a professor of English at the University of Alabama, presents Bloom in his late years claiming that ‘literature is for me not merely the best part of life,’ but ‘is itself the form of life, which has no other form.’ I had to read that more than once to see what he meant. A more effective expression of the idea is found in Bloom’s Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles, published shortly after his death. There, he stated that ‘what you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, and worship if you are capable of worship.’ There are equally eloquent maxims throughout Ms. White’s enjoyable collection. Reading, for these people, was a daily adventure." — James Campbell, The Wall Street Journal (Read the full review)
"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. Here on full display is the kaleidoscopically sublime Bloom: vulnerable, tender, playful, grave, insecure, irritated, thrilled, enigmatic, sardonic, sympathetic, sorrowful. To read Bloom’s literary letters is still to hear the oracular tone and witness the mighty vigor of Bloom, the professional critic. But it is also to luxuriate in Bloom, the idiosyncratic, devoted, and joyful lover of literature and literary creation, in full bloom over an arc of six decades, from graduate student at Yale to professor late in life at the same school. Yet Bloom’s letters will be of interest to more than students and scholars of criticism and literature. They might seem, at first, an odd place to draw inspiration for how to grapple with the world’s many political problems, at home and abroad. But Bloom’s correspondence bears an unmistakable political relevance, one centered on his distinct understanding, and cultivation, of friendship.... In the face of all this and more, Bloom’s correspondence stages, for us, an ideal. With his letters, though reflective of its own type of manosphere, we can witness Bloom at his best: deeply devoted to literary friendship, not simply following but building a literary way of life. In our era of polycrisis, Bloom, despite himself, was in this sense countercultural. Cling to what gives you more life, he counseled. Turn, he might say, to our new and old friends, to life as literature and literature as life, to help create an abundant existence for all. We would do well to heed his voice." — Gregory Jones-Katz, Foreign Policy Magazine (Read the full review)
