Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. He has written more than 20 books of literary criticism. From a lifetime of writing and teaching about literature, this great scholar exhorts readers to consider the pleasures and benefits of reading well. Beginning with a basic question, "Why read?" Bloom offers his thoughts...

Shakespeare invented characters in a new kind of way. He not only gave them personality and depth, he gave them life. Not a life that went simply from point to point, but one that developed rather than unfolded. In so doing, Shakespeare created characters with whom everyone can identify, whether the characters were kings and queens or fools and merchants. Renowned Shakespearian scholar Professor Harold Bloom presents Shakespeare's seven major tragedies...

Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history-and thanks to Shakespeare, one of the most intriguing personalities in literature. She is the lover of Marc Antony, defender of Egypt, and, perhaps most enduringly, a champion of life. Cleopatra is supremely vexing, tragic, and complex. She has fascinated readers and audiences for centuries and has been played by the greatest actresses of their time, from Elizabeth Taylor to Vivien Leigh to Janet...

In all of literature, few antagonists have displayed the ruthless cunning and unscrupulous deceit of Iago, the antagonist to Othello. Often described as Machiavellian, Iago is a fascinating psychological specimen: at once a shrewd expert of the human mind and yet, himself a deeply troubled man. One of Shakespeare's most provocative and culturally relevant plays, Othello is widely studied for its complex and enduring themes of race and racism, love,...

"In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood"--

Don Quixote is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. In the story, a gentleman named Mr. Alonso Quixano reads too many chivalric romances and consequently loses his sanity. Deciding to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, he recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs...