Harold Bloom - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Harold Bloom, son of William and Paula Bloom, was born in New York City and lived in the South Bronx at 1410 Grand Concourse. He was raised as an Orthodox Jew and became a Bar Mitzvah at the age of thirteen. His father was born in Odessa and his mother near Brest Litovsk. He described his mother as "fiercely devout". He had three older sisters and an older brother of whom he is the sole survivor. He grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household and learned Yiddish and literary Hebrew before teaching himself English at the age of six.

Bloom has frequently recounted that his attachment to poetry began when, at the age of ten, he discovered Hart Crane's book White Buildings at the Fordham Library in the Bronx. "Together with William Blake (an influence upon him)," Bloom would write, "Hart Crane was my first love among the great poets, and like Blake he gave me a lifelong addiction to high poetry." He also found and read the Poems and Prophecies of William Blake. "I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time," he said many years later. "I remember being so touched by the enormous availability of large and complex dictionaries and concordances. I remember ransacking them." Bloom says he knew "by age eleven or twelve that all I really liked to do was read poetry and discuss it."

Bloom entered Cornell University in 1947 on scholarship (as one of 65 people in the Bronx that year to win a scholarship from the State Department of Education). At Cornell he found a mentor in M. H. Abrams, a leading scholar of Romanticism and the founding and general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He earned his B.A. in 1952. He then spent a year at Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1954-55 as a Fulbright scholar, where he met and "regularly talked with" C S Lewis. He then went to Yale University, to finish his Ph.D.