Harold Bloom's The Western Canon
This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.
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The Western Canon (Book) by Harold Bloom, 1498 Books
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is a 1994 book about Western literature by the American literary critic Harold Bloom, in which the author defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon.
The Western Canon includes four appendices listing works that Bloom at the time considered canonical, stretching from the earliest scriptures to Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Bloom later disowned the list, saying that it was written at his editor's insistence and distracted from the book's intention.
In adding this list, I did expand certain titles into multiple books, and combined some, since some are single short stories. This was a difficult list to add since there are so many books.
This list was originally published in 1994 and was added to this site over 2 years ago.