Harold Bloom, 1930–2019

Harold Bloom.(photo: Nancy Crampton)

Harold Bloom, one of the most popular and controversial critics in American literature, died Monday at age eighty-nine. He, , and, most recently, His , which appeared in the Spring 1991 issue, is stacked with opinions on writers and their place in the canon. In Bloom’s view, Alice Walker is “an extremely inadequate writer,” John Updike is “a minor novelist with a major style,” and Saul Bellow is “an enormous pleasure but he does not make things difficult enough for himself or for us.”