Bloom is an American literary critic and professor at Yale University. He structures his study of literature around Giambattista Vico's cyclical ages and advocates for the preservation of aesthetic standards. He explicitly opposes contemporary literary movements that prioritize political and social ideologies, grouping these academics together under the title "the School of Resentment."

Shakespeare is an Elizabethan playwright and poet whom Bloom identifies as the unrivaled center of Western literature. He originates the psychological process of "self-overhearing" in his characters, granting them unmatched depth and autonomy. His immense aesthetic value and broad universality cast a formidable shadow of influence over all subsequent generations of writers.

Dante is an Italian poet who establishes Italian literature through his vernacular masterwork, *The Divine Comedy*. Bloom views him as a highly original creator who elevates his personal obsessions, such as the character Beatrice, into a divine hierarchy. His work stands as a testament to poetic autonomy rather than strict Christian theology.

Whitman is a 19th-century American poet whom Bloom establishes as the absolute center of the American literary canon. He operates as a prophet of the "American religion," openly exploring selfhood, autoeroticism, and individual identity in his poetry. He conceptualizes his identity through a trinity of the outward self, the conscious self, and the true soul.

Chaucer is an English poet and public servant who writes *The Canterbury Tales* in Middle English. He creates dynamic characters like the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, setting an early precedent for psychological depth and irony in literature. He tells stories about storytelling, anticipating later novelistic developments.

Cervantes is a Spanish author and military veteran who writes *Don Quixote*. He introduces a distinct form of literary "madness" and establishes an "order of play" through the constant interactions between his main characters. His protagonists seek freedom in exile and knowingly engage in fiction.

Montaigne is a French essayist and skeptic who writes during the French Renaissance. He brings secular reasoning to the forefront of literature and fuses his own personality directly with his writings. He conceptualizes experience as a continuous "passage" rather than a fixed state.

Moliere is a 17th-century French playwright known for classic comedies like *The Misanthrope*. He develops critical comedy by adopting and inverting Montaigne's ideas about humanity and isolation. He crafts moral satirists who ultimately fall victim to the spirit of comedy.

Milton is a 17th-century English poet and political writer best known for his epic poem *Paradise Lost*. He struggles deeply with the anxiety of influence regarding Shakespeare while creating his eloquent, inward-facing character, Satan. He attempts to write a conclusive third Testament for English literature.

Johnson is an English writer, lexicographer, and highly influential literary critic. He avoids writing poetry due to a fear of his own mind and the pressures of literary competition, but he brings a forceful personality to his non-fiction. He practices experiential criticism grounded in personal wisdom.

Goethe is a German polymath and author of *Faust*. He completes a lifelong literary progression over sixty years, writing highly heterodox mythology that adds profound strangeness to beauty. He stands outside standard Christian and Greek mythologies.

Wordsworth is a Romantic poet who launches the Democratic Age of literature. He finds supreme value in the dignity of the common human being, often focusing on impoverished subjects like the Old Cumberland Beggar. He exposes a fundamentally human perspective through natural, secular revelations.

Austen is an English novelist of the Georgian period who uses social convention as a means of liberation for her characters. She crafts psychologically realistic protagonists who combine Protestant will with Romantic sympathetic imagination. She maintains total narrative control without relying on overt political zealotry.

Dickinson is a 19th-century American poet known for her cognitive originality and structurally challenging syntax. She rethinks and renames concepts through her distinct, highly intellectual perspective, often exploring themes of mortality and perception through intentional blanks and omissions.

Dickens is a prolific English novelist of the Victorian era. He employs immense powers of invention and masters the grotesque to create deeply dynamic, internationally influential characters. He uses forward recollection in his narratives to construct Shakespearean psychological change within his protagonists.

Eliot is a 19th-century English novelist who publishes under a male pseudonym to navigate Victorian prejudices. She produces wisdom literature that examines morality, aesthetics, and the impact of society on the individual, prioritizing deep intellectual analysis over conventional romance.

Tolstoy is a prominent Russian novelist who eventually adopts Christian anarchist views. He possesses an expansive imagination and a naturalizing strangeness that exposes readers to their own limited worldviews. He claims a loud distaste for Shakespeare, which Bloom interprets as an active manifestation of literary anxiety.

Ibsen is a Norwegian playwright known for theatrical realism. He infuses his characters with "trollishness," a form of natural amorality that creates aesthetic strangeness. He adapts older tragedy and fantasy formulas into a new kind of Northern tragicomedy.

Freud is an Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis. He attempts to pathologize Shakespeare's characters, an act Bloom views as a defense mechanism against Shakespeare's earlier mapping of human psychology. Despite his flaws in scientific theory, Freud writes with an undeniable, canonical strangeness.

Proust is a French novelist who authors the massive, multi-volume *In Search of Lost Time*. He explores sexual jealousy and psychological realism with an androgynous vision that bridges Western and Eastern literary traditions. He acts as a literary doctor providing retrospective comfort for inevitable unhappy love.

Joyce is an Irish Modernist novelist known for radical linguistic experimentation and highly challenging texts. He directly acknowledges and incorporates his anxiety regarding Shakespeare into his novels, elevating his precursor into a ghostly father figure while maintaining his own unique canonical splendor.

Woolf is an English Modernist writer and essayist. She operates as an Epicurean materialist who reconceptualizes reality through aesthetics, displaying an idiosyncratic love for reading. She writes in reaction against her father and consumes all impediments to her craft without becoming a mere political zealot.

Kafka is a Czech novelist who writes in German and explores themes of the uncanny, patience, and bureaucratic oppression. He examines an ironic transcendence and an "indestructible" deep self linked to his specific cultural heritage. He writes parables that leave characters suspended between purposeful motion and complete stasis.

Borges is an Argentinian writer and essayist who anchors the Latin American canon. He relies on motifs of labyrinths, mirrors, and compasses to express a Gnostic view of literature as a single, continuous work authored by multiple figures. He subverts the anxiety of influence by viewing himself as part of an immortal procession.

Neruda is a Chilean poet and political figure. He writes sprawling poetry that attempts to definitively catalog the natural and human history of South America. He engages in a process of renaming the world, though his communist ideologies occasionally intrude on his aesthetic achievements.

Pessoa is a Portuguese poet who writes under numerous alternate personas known as heteronyms. He fractures his poetic identity to accommodate and expand upon the massive influence of earlier poets, creating distinct voices and backgrounds for each of his fictional personas.

Beckett is an Irish playwright and novelist who writes in both English and French. He rapidly matures as a dramatist to produce works filled with intense, predictive anxiety. He relies on linguistic experimentation and stands as a culmination of the authors who came before him in the modern era.