King Lear is one of the most famous and compelling characters in literature. The aged, abused monarch-a man in his eighties, like Bloom himself-is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from grace and widely agreed to be Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero.
Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding-over the course of his own lifetime-of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.
Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare's characters make. Now he brings that insight to his "measured, thoughtful assessment of a key play in the Shakespeare canon" (Kirkus Reviews). "Lear is a "short, superb book that has a depth of observation acquired from a lifetime of study" (Publishers Weekly).