Critic Bios

Harold Bloom has taught at Yale since 1955. Bloom is among the most prolific of living critics; in addition to his more than twenty major books, he has also published hundreds of essays, reviews, and introductions to the Bloom's Notes series (which he also edits). Bloom first gained attention in the 1960's with his studies of Romantic poetry which sought to overturn the orthodox critical attitude toward Romanticism (established by Eliot and perpetuated by the New Critics). Beginning in the early 1970's, Bloom developed a Freud-inspired genetic approach to the study of literature. His theory was presented in a rapid succession of books: The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1976), and Poetry and Repression (1976). In the 1980's, Bloom separated himself from the poststructuralist approaches adopted by his colleagues at Yale. More recently, he has assumed a public role in the debate over the literary canon; The Western Canon (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) are, in part, polemical salvos against what he sees as the lamentable politicization of literary criticism.

Richard Ellmann (1918-1987) specialized in the study of Irish literature and produced some of the most highly praised biographies of the twentieth century. Ellmann's first book, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948), was based on interviews with the poet's widow and thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts. Ellmann is best-known, however, for his 1959 biography of James Joyce -- a book that Anthony Burgess called "the greatest literary biography of the century." Ellmann was professor of English at Northwestern University, Yale, and Oxford, and traveled widely as visiting professor. His biography of Oscar Wilde received a Pulitzer Prize. His final book, Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett (1986) was published a year before his death and is a recapitulation of his life-long interests as a critic and historian.