Harold Bloom, author of ‘Anxiety of Influence', dies at 89

American literary critic and eminent author, Harold Bloom, died on October 14 at the age of 89. He became famous for his book 'The Anxiety of Influence' and was a standard-bearer of Western civilization amid modern trends. Bloom's wife, Jeanne, said he was not keeping well and had been failing health. Despite his health, he continued to write books and was teaching as recently as last week. Bloom died at a New Haven, Connecticut, hospital according to the reports.

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Bloom wrote more than 20 books

Bloom wrote more than 20 books and worked on making scholarly topics easily accessible by a general reader. He appeared on best-seller lists with his books 'The Western Canon' and 'The Book of J'. He was a guest on Good Morning America and other programs and was a National Book Award finalist. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A survey conducted by the Modern Library positioned 'The Western Canon' at No. 58 on a rundown of the twentieth century's best nonfiction English-language books. His bestseller 'The Anxiety of Influence' is his greatest legacy of all times which could carry his name for a long time. Bloom contended that innovativeness was not a thankful bow to the past, yet a Freudian wrestle where artists denied and contorted their artistic ancestors while creating work that uncovered an unmistakable debt.

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Some praised his extraordinary abilities

Bloom openly acknowledged his own heroes, among them Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and the 19th-century critic Walter Pater. The news of his death received a mixed response from the former Yale University students. Some praised his extraordinary abilities to recite a verse from memory, while others noted accusations of sexual harassment. In 2004, the author Naomi Wolf wrote that he made unwanted advances while she was attending Yale. Bloom denied the allegations. He was born in 1930 in New York's East Bronx to Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia. He graduated in 1951 from Cornell University where he studied under the celebrated critic M.H. Abrams and lived abroad as a Fulbright Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

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