num_pages: 500
description: Our foremost literary critic on our most essential writers from Emerson and Whitman to Hurston and Ellison from Faulkner and O'Connor to Ursula K. LeGuin and Philip Roth.No critic has better understood the ways writers influence one anotherhow literary traditions are madeand no writer has helped readers understand this better than Harold Bloom. Over the course of a remarkable sixty-year career in such bestselling books as The Western Canon  Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human  and How to Read and Why  Bloom brought enormous insight and infectious enthusiasm to the great writers of the Western tradition from Shakespeare and Cervantes to the British Romantics and the Russian masters. Now for the first time comes a collection of his brilliant writings about the American tradition the ultimate guide to our nations literature. Assembled with David Mikics ( Slow Reading in a Hurried Age ) this unprecedented collection gathers five decades worth of Blooms writings much of it hard to find and long unavailableincluding 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 BloomEmerson and Whitman Hawthorne and Melville and Dickinson Faulkner Crane Frost Stevens and Bishopmake their appearance in The American Canon  along with Hemingway James OConnor Ellison Hurston Le Guin Ashbery and many others. Blooms 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 .
language: None
title: The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Le Guin
publisher: Library of America