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Assembled with David Mikics (Slow Reading in a Hurried Age), this unprecedented collection gathers five decades' worth of Bloom's writings-- much of it hard to find and long unavailable--including essays, occasional pieces, and introductions as well as excerpts from his books. It offers deep readings of 47 essential American writers, reflecting on the surprising ways they have influenced each other across more than two centuries. The story it tells, of American literature as a recurring artistic struggle for selfhood, speaks to the passion and power of the American spirit.
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?make their appearance in The American Canon, along with Hemingway, James, O'Connor, Ellison, Hurston, Le Guin, Ashbery and many others. Bloom's passion for these classic writers is contagious, and he reminds readers how they have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be better versions of ourselves. Bloom, Mikics writes, "is still our most inspirational critic, still the man who can enlighten us by telling us to read as if our lives depended on it: Because, he insists, they do."
For readers who want to deepen their appreciation of American literature, there's no better place to start than The American Canon.
Review Quotes
"Ambitious, authoritative, and certainly arguable, Bloom's compendium is an achievement of immense use and interest to literature students and general readers alike." --Publishers Weekly
"He stands for a rare intellectual purity, being not only a kind of shaggy saint in his devotion to literature but also ... a gadfly, a doomsayer and a great teacher."
--Michael Dirda, The Wall Street Journal
"...an impressive and important look at what he sees as the core of American literature."
--PopMatters.com
About the Author
David Mikics is the Moores Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Houston. He is the editor of The Annotated Emerson and the author, most recently, of Bellow's People and Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. His reviews and articles have appeared in Tablet, the New Republic, and the New York Times.