Harold Bloom, one of the most gifted, original, and provocative literary critics in the Western tradition, is often as acute about his own work as he is about others'. In an interview published in 1987 Bloom told Imre Salusinszky that “Although I can write, and probably will write, my dear - if I live - another thirty-five books, I am reconciled to the fact that to my dying day and beyond I will be regarded as the author of one book: The Anxiety of Influence. ”Bloom is surely on target; when his name comes up, people think first of his theory of influence anxiety. Yet on its publication in 1973 The Anxiety of Influence was accorded anything but a gracious reception. “Harold Bloom had an idea, ” mocked one reader, “then it had him. ”

But Bloom has apparently enjoyed the last laugh. Borrowing some lines from William James, Bloom notes that response to The Anxiety's thesis has passed through three stages. Granted people began by calling it absurd; in time, though, academic critics claimed that the book was completely obvious and that they'd known it all along; then finally the last phase: Bloom's antagonists started saying that they'd come up with the celebrated idea of influence anxiety themselves. In doing so they presumably indulged in the kind of fantasy that Bloom's book seeks to debunk, the wish to be your precursor's great original, to father your own father.