The Western Canon is the most famous and probably the most polemical book by Harold Bloom (b. 1930), Sterling Professor at Yale University, the famous American critic and literary scholar. Bloom passionately defends the autonomy of aesthetic value and the necessity of the canon in the face of the “School of Resentment,” cultural trends that have become virtually unchallenged since the book's first publication (1994). Developing the concepts of “fear of influence” and “creative distortion” formulated in his other books, Bloom talks about twenty-six major authors of the Western world (from Dante to Tolstoy, from Goethe to Beckett, from Dickinson to Neruda), and places Shakespeare at the very center of the canon , which, according to the researcher, in many ways created us all.