"Harold Bloom ... returns with a definitive yet personal book on twelve American writers upon whose work he believes the American canon is built. While his references to American writers are wide-ranging, he focuses on twelve: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Hart Crane-- those writers whose works make...

"In his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction, America's most original and controversial literary critic and legendary Yale professor writes trenchantly about fifty-two masterworks spanning the Western tradition"-- Provided by publisher. Bloom offers meditations on forty-eight essential works of fiction that span the Western canon. While considering each novels' strengths and shortcomings, he also explains where and why he differs...

The last book written by the most famous literary critic of his generation, on the sustaining power of poetry.