The American canon : literary genius from Emerson to Pynchon / Harold Bloom ; edited by David Mikics.

"Five decades of writing on American literature"--Jacket.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 425-426).

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) -- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) -- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) -- Walt Whitman (1819-1892) -- Herman Melville (1819-1891) -- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) -- Henry James (1843-1916) -- Edith Wharton (1862-1937) -- Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) -- Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) -- Willa Cather (1873-1947) -- Robert Frost (1874-1963) -- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) -- William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) -- Marianne Moore (1887-1972) -- T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) -- Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) -- Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) -- Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) -- William Faulkner (1897-1962) -- Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) -- Hart Crane (1899-1932) -- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) -- Nathanael West (1903-1940) -- Eudora Welty (1909-2001) -- Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) -- Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) -- Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) -- Robert Hayden (1913-1980) -- Carson McCullers (1917-1967) -- James Baldwin (1924-1987) -- Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) -- James Merrill (1926-1995) -- A.R. Ammons (1926-2001), John Ashbery (1927-2017), W.S. Merwin (1927-2019) -- Edward Albee (1928-2016) -- Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) -- Toni Morrison (b. 1931) -- Philip Roth (1933-2018) -- Cormac McCarthy (b. 1933) -- Jay Wright (b. 1934) -- Don DeLillo (b. 1936) -- Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937).

"Harold Bloom is our greatest living student of literature, "a colossus among critics" (The New York Times) and a "master entertainer" (Newsweek). Over the course of a remarkable career spanning more than half a century, in such best-selling books as The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he transformed the way we look at the masterworks of western literature. Now, in the first collection devoted to his illuminating writings specifically on American literature, Bloom reflects on the surprising ways American writers have influenced each other across more than two centuries. The American Canon gathers five decades of Bloom's essays, occasional pieces, and introductions as well as excerpts from several of his books, weaving them together into an unrivalled tour of the great American bookshelf. Always a champion of aesthetic power, Bloom tells the story of our national literature in terms of artistic struggle against powerful predecessors and the American thirst for selfhood. All of the visionary American writers who have long preoccupied Bloom--Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville, and Dickinson, Faulkner, Crane, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop--are here, along with Hemingway, James, O'Connor, Ellison, Hurston, LeGuin, Ashbery and many others. Bloom's enthusiasm for these American geniuses is contagious, and he reminds us how these writers have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be yet better versions of ourselves."--Amazon.