Harold Bloom, son of William Bloom and Paula Levi, was born into a working-class Jewish family in New York, his father making a living as a garment worker. He was educated at Cornell University, where he gained his B.A. in 1951, and at Yale University, where he gained his Ph.D in 1955. In 1958 he married Jeanne Gould with whom he has two sons. He spent the majority of his academic career at Yale where, since 1983, he was Sterling Professor of Humanities.
Bloom was always a prodigious author. His early critical work in the 1950s and 1960s centres on the study of Romantic poetry. An important contributor to the reassessment of Romanticism in those two decades, Bloom published Shelley's Mythmaking in 1959, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry in 1961, Blake's
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Citation: Allen, Graham. "Harold Bloom". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 November 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=450, accessed 22 November 2024.]
