It was easy to admire Harold Bloom. One of the most distinguished American literary critics, he always gave the impression of having read anything and everything by the great and the good. Over the course of a 60-year writing career, he produced a steady stream of books that showcased the scope of his reading and illustrated the merits of a range of novelists, poets, playwrights, and thinkers. The best of his books revolved around grandiose claims that were followed by cogent, convincing arguments. In The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), he examined literary inheritance, asserting that writers wrote under the shadow of predecessors. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), he explored how the Bard created the modern sense of selfhood.