We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

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After Beckett's death in 1989 Bloom has pointed towards other authors as the new main figures of the Western literary canon. "I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time" he said many years later. I purchased and read Fearful Symmetry a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca New York.

These theories dominated his writing for a decade after which he began to focus on what he named "religious criticism" in books such as The Book of J (1990) and The American Religion (1992). He has edited hundreds of anthologies for the Chelsea House publishing firm.