Harold Bloom (1930–2019) was an American literary critic and scholar widely regarded as one of the most formidable and provocative intellectual voices of the twentieth century. Born in the East Bronx, New York, to Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant parents, Bloom demonstrated an astonishing memory and appetite for literature from childhood. He earned his doctorate from Yale University in 1955 and remained associated with Yale for the rest of his career as Sterling Professor of Humanities, also holding appointments at New York University and other institutions. Over decades he produced a body of work remarkable in both volume and ambition, including The Anxiety of Influence (1973), The Western Canon (1994), and The American Religion (1992).
Bloom’s critical signature was a theory of literary creativity as agonistic struggle: strong writers achieve originality not by ignoring their predecessors but by creatively wrestling with and misreading them, clearing imaginative space through what he called the “anxiety of influence.” This framework, drawn partly from Romantic poetry and partly from Kabbalistic thought, gave his criticism an almost mythological intensity. He was a fierce defender of the literary canon and a tireless champion of imaginative difficulty against what he saw as the ideological flattening of humanistic study.
Bloom brought the same intensity to American religious history, and his engagement with Mormonism produced some of his most captivating writing. In The American Religion he argued that Joseph Smith was a religious genius whose revelations constituted one of the most original theological achievements in the history of the West. Bloom located the deepest nerve of authentic religion in the confrontation with mortality, and he judged early Mormonism the tradition that most vehemently and persuasively refuses to accept death as final. That judgment, coming from an outside observer with no stake in belief, carries its own kind of testimony. It points toward something that Mormon transhumanists recognize at the core of the Restoration: the conviction that death is a problem to be overcome, that human beings are destined for something far greater than biological limits suggest, and that this aspiration is not wishful thinking but a serious theological and ultimately practical claim about the nature of intelligence, embodiment, and divine possibility.