Description

---

A critical novel about the ways in which we absorb various forms of wisdom from the literature we consume, from the author The New York Times calls “the most influential critic of the last quarter-century.”

In one of his most inspiring books yet, Harold Bloom, our preeminent literary critic, takes the reader from the Bible through the twentieth century, searching for the ways literature can inform lives. Through comparisons of the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, Plato and Homer, Johnson and Goethe, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Bacon, Emerson and Nietzsche, Freud and Proust, and finally discussions of the Gospel of Thomas and St. Augustine, Bloom distills the various—and even contrary—forms of wisdom that have shaped our thinking.

About the Author

---

Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,The Western Canon, and The American Religion. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy’s Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Catalonia International Prize, and the Alfonso Reyes International Prize of Mexico. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and in New York City.

Praise For…

---

"[A] touching work." - The New York Times

"In his intricate discussion of each great writer, Bloom offers the rich perceptions of a scholar drawing on the whole of a long and thoughtful career." - Publishers Weekly

"Another work of uncompromised literary analysis, thought, and feeling, from the mind of Bloom: towering, real, invaluable." - Kirkus Reviews

"Bloom remains engaging enough to make you want to read him, argue with him and learn from him." - The Washington Post