The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime is described by Bloom as “about the dozen creators who have formed the American Sublime… . These writers represent our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism.”
A collection of reviews appear in Writer’s Reps.com which includes reviews from Cynthia Ozick of The New York Times Book Review, Donna Seaman of Booklist, Christopher Buckley of Vanity Fair, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and more. Elucidating quotes from the book are highlighted in How Harold Bloom Selected His Top 12 American Authors, by Mary Alice Miller of Vanity Fair.
Praise for Harold Bloom and The Daemon Knows
“The sublime The Daemon Knows is a veritable feast for the general reader (me) as well as the advanced (I assume) one.”—John Ashbery
“[Bloom] is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century.”—Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times Book Review
“As always, Bloom conveys the intimate, urgent, compelling sense of why it matters that we read these canonical authors.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Bloom thinks in the sweep of millennia, of intellectual patterns that unfold over centuries, of a vast and intricate labyrinth of interconnections between artists from Plato to Pater.”—Michael Lindgren, The Washington Post