The Anatomy of Bloom: Harold Bloom and the Study of Influence and Anxiety, Alistair Heys

Here at last is a comprehensive introduction to the career of Americas leading intellectual. The Anatomy of Bloom surveys Harold Blooms life as a literary critic, exploring all of his books in chronological order, to reveal that his work, and especially his classic The Anxiety of Influence, is best understood as an expression of reprobate American Protestantism and yet haunted by a Jewish fascination with the Holocaust.

Heys traces Blooms intellectual development from his formative years spent as a poor second-generation immigrant in the Bronx to his later eminence as an international literary phenomenon. He argues that, as the quintessential living embodiment of the American dream, Blooms career-path deconstructs the very foundations of American Protestantism.