Harold Bloom: Culture Gods from Emerson to Bird
“If God appeared in 19th Century America,” Harold Bloom told me, ”it was as Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the 20th Century it would have been as Charlie Parker.”
Who knew that Yale’s monumental literature man was a bebopper? No mere record collector, either. Bloom remembers haunting Minton’s and other Harlem hatcheries of the new jazz in the 1940s. A half century ago [...]