Harold Bloom is the Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he has been on the faculty for half a century. Arguably the nation's most widely influential literary critic, his books include The Visionary Company (1961), Yeats (1970), The Anxiety of Influence (1973), The Flight to Lucifer: Gnostic Fantasy (1980), Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (1989), The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992), Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996), and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005).

I first met Prof. Bloom in 1995 when I took his junior Shakespeare seminar at Yale. He once called me "very shrewd" in class, but wound up giving me a B in the course. I interviewed him at his home in New Haven in 2005.