An American literary critic, Harold Bloom was been Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His published works range across the areas of Shakespeare, the Bible and the classics and include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, and The Anxiety of Influence. A polarising figure, he was known as a champion of the Western canon, and came to prominence in the critical debate over the canon in the 1990s.
Bloom was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the recipient of numerous awards, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Criticism, and received honorary degrees from the Universities of Rome and Bologna.
Bloom died in New Haven, Connecticut, in October 2019.
