Winner of the Christian Gauss Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1989, this book surveys the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. The author re-reads 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, Bloom concludes that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations.