How to Read and Why

Front Cover
Simon and Schuster, Oct 2, 2001 - Fiction - 283 pages
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom.
Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. His ultimate faith in the restorative power of literature resonates on every page of this infinitely rewarding and important book.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Preface
19
SHORT STORIES
31
Guy de Maupassant
42
Flannery OConnor
51
Vladimir Nabokov
54
Tommaso Landolfi
60
POEMS
69
Robert Browning
79
Great Expectations
162
The Portrait of a Lady
173
In Search of Lost Time
181
The Magic Mountain
187
Summary Observations
193
PLAYS
199
Hedda Gabler
218
The Importance of Being Earnest
224

Walt Whitman
88
Dickinson Brontë Popular Ballads and Tom OBedlam
94
William Shakespeare
110
John Milton
116
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
124
Summary Observations
138
Don Quixote
145
Emma
156
Summary Observations
231
As I Lay Dying
239
Miss Lonelyhearts
245
Blood Meridian
254
Invisible Man
263
Song of Solomon
269
Completing the Work
277
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About the author (2001)

Harold Bloom was born on July 11, 1930 in New York City. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Cornell in 1951 and his Doctorate from Yale in 1955. After graduating from Yale, Bloom remained there as a teacher, and was made Sterling Professor of Humanities in 1983. Bloom's theories have changed the way that critics think of literary tradition and has also focused his attentions on history and the Bible. He has written over twenty books and edited countless others. He is one of the most famous critics in the world and considered an expert in many fields. In 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new institution in Savannah, Georgia, that focuses on primary texts. His works include Fallen Angels, Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems, Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life and The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of The King James Bible. Harold Bloom passed away on October 14, 2019 in New Haven, at the age of 89.

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