The Daemon Knows ― Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

"Harold Bloom, named "The indispensible critic" by the New York Review of Books, 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 up what he calls the American sublime. A book by our greatest literary critic writing on these great American writers will be a must-read for anyone interested in American literature"--

Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books includeThe Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, andThe American Religion. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy’s Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Catalonia International Prize, and the Alfonso Reyes International Prize of Mexico. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and in New York City.