It was easy to admire Harold Bloom. One of the most distinguished American literary critics, he always gave the impression of having read anything and everything by the great and the good. Over the course of a 60-year writing career, he produced a steady stream of books that showcased the scope of his reading and illustrated the merits of a range of novelists, poets, playwrights, and thinkers. The best of his books revolved around grandiose claims that were followed by cogent, convincing arguments. In The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), he examined literary inheritance, asserting that writers wrote under the shadow of predecessors. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), he explored how the Bard created the modern sense of selfhood.By the same token, it was just as easy to be irked by Bloom. He judged each literary work on purely aesthetic terms, giving little or no consideration to social, political, or historical contexts. He acted as a strict gatekeeper of the “Western canon” and dogmatically refused to admit new writers. He constantly denounced the feminists, Marxists, and literary theorists who made up what he called “the school of resentment.” In his later, more mainstream books, an output which smacked of quantity over quality, he bloviated and pontificated. Bloom’s last published book appeared in 2020, a year after his death at 89. A different, posthumous Bloom offering now sees the light of day. The Man Who Read Everything is a collection of Bloom’s literary letters. The title is silly: those who remember Bloom’s scathing takedowns of Stephen King (“immensely inadequate”) and the first Harry Potter book (“slop”) will know he didn’t waste his time reading more than he had to of what he considered inferior literature. However, the contents are fascinating, for they allow us a valuable glimpse into how this true one-off worked, thought, and communicated with those whose writing he held in high esteem.