He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm.

[6] Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "School of Resentment" (which included multiculturalism, feminism, Marxism, and other ideologies).

[12] Bloom's father, a garment worker, was born in Odesa and his Lithuanian Jewish mother, a homemaker, near Brest Litovsk in what is today Belarus.

"[23] In a 2004 article for New York magazine, Naomi Wolf wrote that while she was an undergraduate student at Yale University in 1983, Bloom attended a dinner with her, saying he would discuss her writing.

Bloom had a contentious approach: his first book, Shelley's Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of the poet.

[citation needed] After a personal crisis during the late 1960s, Bloom became deeply interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism.

In the introduction to this volume, Bloom set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: "Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle."

Figures of Capable Imagination collected odd pieces Bloom had written in the process of composing his "influence" books.

Bloom's fascination with David Lindsay's fantasy novel A Voyage to Arcturus led him to take a brief break from criticism to compose a sequel to it.

[32] Bloom then entered a phase of what he called "religious criticism", beginning with Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (1989).

They envisaged this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite kings David and Solomon – a piece of speculation that drew much attention.

In The American Religion (1992), Bloom surveyed the major varieties of Protestant and post-Protestant religious faiths that originated in the United States and argued that, in terms of their psychological hold on their adherents, most had more in common with gnosticism than with historical Christianity.

The second edition, published in 1997, added a long preface that mostly expounded Shakespeare's debt to Ovid and Chaucer, and his agon with Christopher Marlowe, who set the stage for him by breaking free of ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones.

The two paragons of his theory were Sir John Falstaff of Henry IV and Hamlet, whom Bloom saw as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively.

As in The Western Canon, Bloom criticizes what he calls the "School of Resentment" for its failure to live up to the challenge of Shakespeare's universality and for balkanizing the study of literature through multicultural and historicist departments.

Bloom consolidated his work on the Western canon with the publication of How to Read and Why (2000) and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003).

It centers on people's reactions to hearing for the first time Olivier Messiaen's organ piece Apparition de l'église éternelle.

Bloom began a book under the working title Living Labyrinth, centering on Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, which was published as The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011).

"[49] But in Anatomy of Influence (2011), Bloom wrote, "I no longer have the patience to read anything by Frye" and nominated Angus Fletcher among his living contemporaries as his "critical guide and conscience".

As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably "misread" their precursors to make room for fresh imaginings.

"[53] Bloom's association with the Western canon provoked a substantial interest in his opinion of the relative importance of contemporary writers.

[55] In Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003), he called the Portuguese writer José Saramago "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre".

[56] Saying that "they write the Style of our Age" and that "each has composed canonical works", he identified them as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo.

He named their respective masterpieces as The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon; Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral; Blood Meridian; and Underworld.

[58] Shortly before his death, Bloom expressed admiration for the works of Joshua Cohen, William Giraldi, and Nell Freudenberger.

[59] In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Bloom identified Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets.

By the 1990s, he regularly named A. R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he later identified Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three.

[66] James Wood wrote: "Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own – a kind of campiness, in fact – Bloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant.

[42] In the early 21st century, Bloom often found himself at the center of literary controversy after criticizing popular writers such as Adrienne Rich,[67] Maya Angelou,[68] and David Foster Wallace.

[71] MormonVoices, a group associated with Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research, included Bloom on its Top Ten Anti-Mormon Statements of 2011 list for saying, "The current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as 'prophet, seer and revelator', is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy.