I fail to see how a writer who who did not live here encapsulates our country. and spent most of his writing life in England.
Henry James: Henry James left the U.S. The novel is an education in fraternity and should be read alongside Leaves of Grass whenever you’re feeling a drizzly November in your soul. Most people do, but to me the book belongs to Ishmael’s un-Ahabbing. Herman Melville: Bloom focuses on Ahab. I loved reading The Scarlet Letter and my favorite book is dedicated to him, but he’s not in my top 12. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Writing at the same time as Emerson and Whitman, he seems to serve as a puritanical antithesis to their desire to cast off history. He is both our desire to include all and be all and our continuing failure to meet that challenge. Walt Whitman: I had a professor in grad school call Whitman and Dickinson ” American’s Queer Aunt and Uncle.” Walt Whitman is the United States. Both are necessary to understanding this country. Where Whitman is expansive (we’ll get to him next), Dickinson’s work is claustrophobic in its tininess. Emily Dickinson: She’s the only woman on his list, but I don’t think it’s a token inclusion. Emerson is the pioneer spirit (without actually really leaving the East Coast) and he wrote eloquently on the need for an American literary tradition and the American Poet. Ralph Waldo Emerson: I get this and I understand what he’s #1. These are the writers who “best exemplify ‘The American Sublime.'” The article doesn’t tell us what Bloom thinks the American Sublime is, but based on his list I’m assuming Professor Bloom is interested in those writers who seem to most encapsulate what it is to be and live in America. In it (and this month’s Vanity Fair) he outlines the 12 most important American writers. Yale professor and professional Dead White Guy enthusiast, Harold Bloom, is out with a new book on the American Canon.
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