Short answers, pulled from the story.
Harold Bloom was born on the 11th of July 1930 in New York City and grew up at 1410 Grand Concourse in the Bronx. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish, Yiddish-speaking household and learned English at the age of six.
Bloom's theory holds that new poets are inspired by earlier poets but come to resent them when they realize their predecessors have already said everything they wish to say. To create original work, poets must perform what Bloom called a "strong misreading" of their precursors, convincing themselves that those earlier poets failed in some way and left open creative possibilities. He began writing The Anxiety of Influence in 1967 and published it in 1973.
Published in 1994, The Western Canon surveyed major literary works of Europe and the Americas from the fourteenth century onward and focused on twenty-six works Bloom considered sublime. Bloom argued against what he called the "School of Resentment," critics who applied feminist, Marxist, and multiculturalist frameworks to literature, insisting that the purpose of reading was solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than social improvement.
Bloom was a member of the Yale English Department from 1955 to 2019, a span of more than six decades. He taught his final class four days before his death on the 14th of October 2019 in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age of eighty-nine.
In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, published in 1998, Bloom analyzed all thirty-eight of Shakespeare's plays, declaring twenty-four of them masterpieces. He argued that Shakespeare invented humanity by establishing the practice of overhearing oneself, and identified Sir John Falstaff and Prince Hamlet as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing respectively.
Beginning with Ruin the Sacred Truths in 1989, Bloom spent several years writing about religion as a form of literary criticism. Key works included The Book of J (1990), in which he proposed that one of the source documents behind the first five books of the Bible was written by a woman at the court of the successors of the Israelite kings David and Solomon, and The American Religion (1992), which argued that most American Protestant faiths had more in common with gnosticism than with historical Christianity.