To the Reader by Harold Bloom

Fundación Shakespeare Argentina expresses deep and sincere gratitude to Professor Harold Bloom. In 2012 he shared with us this wonderful excerpt from his monumental book Shakespeare The Invention of the Human.

Harold Bloom (1930-2019)

Harold Bloom was Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he taught for more than fifty years until his death at age 89. He was also a past Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University and Berg Professor of English at New York University. He wrote more than thirty books, including The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon, and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where in 1999 he was awarded their highest honor, the Gold Medal for belles lettres and criticism. He also has received many other awards and honorary degrees, including, Mexico’s Premio Internacional Alfonso Reyes Prize for 2003. (Other authors awarded the Reyes Prize include Octavio Paz, Andre Malraux, Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes.) In 2002 he was awarded the Catalonia International Prize, given to “individuals whose creative work has contributed decisively to promoting cultural, scientific and human values throughout the world.” (Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Mstislav Rostropovitch, and Václav Havel are among the previous recipients.) He also won a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and Phi Beta Kappa’s 1989 Christian Gauss Award for an outstanding work of literary scholarship or criticism.

To the Reader (Excerpt from Shakespeare The Invention of the Human)

Quoted from Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by permission of Harold Bloom c/o Writers Representatives, LLC (www.writersreps.com), all rights reserved.