born July 11, 1930, New York, N.Y., U.S.
U.S. literary critic.
Bloom studied at Cornell and Yale universities and taught at Yale from 1955. In The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975) he suggested that poetry results from poets deliberately misreading the works that both influence and threaten them. In The Book of J (1990) he speculated that the earliest known biblical texts were written by a woman with principally literary intentions. His best-selling The Western Canon (1994) identifies 26 canonical Western writers and argues against the politicization of literary study.