Was Harold Bloom a sexual predator?
A superstar author had “vices”
Published in
7 min readApr 11, 2024
He was a superstar of academic literary criticism. Looking like an eccentric genius, he spoke the language of poets, and knew every “great” book ever written.
That was his act, at least. In 1955, Harold Bloom became a member of Yale University’s English Department, as he remained to his death in 2019. He was a profound and powerful teacher of a deeper kind of reading.
It was less well-known that he was a habitual sexual harasser, or worse.
Bloom was married with children, but didn’t seem that sexual.
In his popular writings, he didn’t seem to linger much on sexual themes. He was there for the “wisdom” he found in the ‘great books’.
But his tastes, it turns out, weren’t just for literature. A 2020 article in The Politic, Emily Tian dips into his archive, and finds him, in 1965, writing a colleague, John Hollander:
“I am trying to give up my major vices (lady graduate students, gluttony, sado-masochism, melancholy, paranoia) but it is not easy.”
