The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I devoted most of my days to reading poetry. Otherwise I read mythology, history, religious texts, novels, and stories. I omit the reading of Shakespeare, which was constant. Reaching back into time, I remember an early obsession with the novels of Thomas Hardy. He led me on to D. H. Lawrence and then to Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster.

As a Cornell undergraduate of seventeen, I had the good fortune to participate in a seminar on the novel taught by Professor William M. Sale, Jr. Sale was a lean, rangy Kentuckian who spoke with a slow drawl and demonstrated a fierce reluctance to deal with fools. At seventeen I was afraid of him, but by the time I graduated I had spent many afternoons in his house with him, his gracious wife, Helen Stearns, and with his oldest son, William, who became a distinguished classicist and a lifelong friend until his death in Saint Louis in 2017. In a yearlong seminar with Professor Sale, we began with Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. We devoted a month to that extraordinary novel, reading it uncut. I regard Clarissa and In Search of Lost Time as the two most eminent of all novels, surpassing even Tolstoy and Dickens. I realize that again I will always be Sale's student. I am assuming that Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, Joyce's Ulysses, and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables are closer to epics than to novels.