Harold Bloom Archive Acquired by The Harry Ransom Center
Harold Bloom
The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin has acquired the papers of literary scholar and cultural critic Harold Bloom who taught for six decades in the English Department at Yale University.
Bloom's archive contains more than 50 notebooks in which he worked out his ideas for his many books, articles, and lectures dating from the mid-1960s up until his death in 2019. Also present are letters with numerous writers whose work he championed and with whom he maintained epistolary friendships including poets A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill, and Robert Penn Warren.
On reading Bloom’s assessment of his poems, John Ashbery wrote to him of the shock of recognition that he experienced: “I can almost feel that I am seeing myself as I would look if I could step outside myself . . . I really feel like one of Ingres’ sitters confronted with his portrait.”
The Harold Bloom papers are a gift of his wife, Jeanne Bloom, who said" “I am sure Harold would have been very pleased to know that his papers have received such a good home.”
The collection will be available for research once processing is completed.
