Professor Harold Bloom celebrates his 85th birthday on July 11, and Infobase is proud to honor him—an accomplished literary scholar and a longtime colleague and friend who has collaborated with Infobase for more than 30 years.

Harold Bloom has been an original mind and provocative presence on the international library scene for decades. Born in New York City in 1930 and educated at Cornell and Yale universities, Professor Bloom has been a dedicated educator, teaching courses at Yale since 1955. Since then he has been a prolific writer, too, authoring dozens of major books of literary criticism and hundreds of articles, reviews, and editorial introductions—among them a vast collection of critical volumes for Infobase’s Bloom’s imprint, in series such as Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations, Bloom’s Guides, Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages, and many more. He has received numerous prestigious awards and honors.

Professor Bloom’s works with Infobase make up the backbone of the company’s Bloom’s Literature database, which contains comprehensive essays and literary criticism on the lives of great authors and their works throughout history. The award-winning database features a searchable version of Bloom’s Literary Canon—the authors and works that Professor Bloom has selected to represent the greatest achievements of the Western literary tradition—along with a valuable Bloom’s How to Write about Literature section, which includes suggestions for writing about popularly studied authors along with possible topics for further expansion and research.

Professor Bloom remains a robust literary presence. His new trade book The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, just published this year by Spiegel & Grau, has been widely and very positively reviewed—including on the front cover of The New York Times Book Review, where the writer Cynthia Ozick wrote that Bloom “bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic colossus…He is himself no Whitman or Melville, no Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens, no Hart Crane or Emerson. And yet he seems at times almost as large as any of these, so vital and particularized is his presence.”

Newsweek has called Harold Bloom “a master entertainer.” The New York Review of Books calls him “the indispensable critic.” We at Infobase are grateful to call him a colleague and friend