The Book Prize Index

Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best.

Arts & CriticismArts & Criticism · high confidenceArts & Criticism81 signalsLlm Classifier: Arts & Criticism -> Arts & CriticismGoogle Books: Literary Criticism -> Arts & CriticismKeyword Classifier: Arts & Criticism -> Arts & CriticismEssays & Cultural CriticismLabor, Work & OrganizingLiterature & Writers

Award History

1 wins · 1 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards: Christian Gauss Award1989WinnerOfficial source
View all award history (1)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    Attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations.

    Model confidence 72%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    78 / 100 academic

    Academic

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 76%.