The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon
436The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon
436Hardcover
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Overview
No critic has better understood the ways writers influence one another—how literary traditions are made—and 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 nation’s literature.
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781598536409 |
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Publisher: | Library of America |
Publication date: | 10/15/2019 |
Pages: | 436 |
Sales rank: | 1,071,585 |
Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
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.
Hometown:
New York, New York and New Haven, ConnecticutDate of Birth:
July 11, 1930Date of Death:
October 14, 2019Place of Birth:
New York, New YorkEducation:
B.A., Cornell University, 1951; Ph.D., Yale University, 1955Table of Contents
Preface David Mikics ix
Introduction David Mikics 1
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) 13
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) 39
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) 45
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) 61
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) 67
Herman Melville (1819-1891) 101
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) 111
Mark Twain (1835-1910) 127
Henry James (1843-1916) 130
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) 139
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) 150
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) 154
Willa Cather (1873-1947) 158
Robert Frost (1874-1963) 163
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) 174
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) 194
Marianne Moore (1887-1972) 203
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) 213
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) 216
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) 226
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) 231
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) 235
William Faulkner (1897-1962) 240
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) 250
Hart Crane (1899-1932) 252
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) 266
Nathanael West (1903-1940) 275
Eudora Welty (1909-2001) 285
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) 295
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) 298
Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) 309
Robert Hayden (1913-1980) 315
Carson McCullers (1917-1967) 319
James Baldwin (1924-1987) 324
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) 333
James Merrill (1926-1995) 342
A. R. Ammons (1926-2001), John Ashbery (1927-2017), W. S. Merwin (1927-2019) 350
Edward Albee (1928-2016) 370
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) 375
Toni Morrison (b. 1931) 386
Philip Roth (1933-2018) 389
Cormac McCarthy (b. 1933) 397
Jay Wright (b. 1934) 406
Don DeLillo (b. 1936) 410
Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937) 416
Sources and Acknowledgments 425