“[Bloom] is the Satan of criticism...he is heroic even in those passages in which we are permitted to suspect that he may be a charlatan.”—Dennis Donoghue, New York Review of Books

The most prodigious literary mind of his generation on the transcendent acts of self-creation that define the Western canon, from the Torah to Samuel Beckett.

John Milton’s contemporary Andrew Marvell once confessed that reading Paradise Lost troubled his faith. Milton’s lyrical prowess was beyond doubt, but precisely because of his poetic genius Marvell feared “That he would ruin (for I saw him strong) / The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song.” If heaven, hell, and rebelling angels were reduced to fodder for the poet’s imagination, how could they remain objects of sincere religious belief?

In this fascinating series of lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1987–1988, Harold Bloom confirms Marvell’s worst fear: all serious poets, Bloom argues, must ruin the sacred truths, unraveling cherished beliefs and literary traditions to create a world in their own image. From the earliest source documents of the Torah, written by a hypothetical author called the Yahwist or simply “J,” to the heretical reinterpretations of Judaism in Freud, Kafka, and Gershom Scholem, Bloom shows us how great authors construct the new by destroying the old. In the process they wrest divinity from the hand of the deity: Milton’s Satan, infinitely more complex and compelling than his God, embodies the author’s pursuit of humanity and literary greatness against the strictures of received religion; Wordsworth, prophet of nature, “celebrates his own godhood”; and Shakespeare’s characters, as much as the Bible’s, establish a ubiquitous and inescapable framework for representing the human personality.

Brisk and impassioned, Ruin the Sacred Truths gives us Bloom in all his dimensions. Jewish Gnostic, reverent Freudian, and relentless proselytizer of the sublime, he was convinced, above all, that if salvation could be found anywhere, it would be in poetry.

A cultural history of the South Bronx that reaches beyond familiar narratives of urban ruin and renaissance, beyond the “inner city” symbol, to reveal the place and people obscured by its myths.

For decades, the South Bronx was America’s “inner city.” Synonymous with civic neglect, crime, and metropolitan decay, the Bronx became the preeminent symbol used to proclaim the failings of urban places and the communities of color who lived in them. Images of its ruins—none more infamous than the one broadcast live during the 1977 World Series: a building burning near Yankee Stadium—proclaimed the failures of urbanism.

Yet this same South Bronx produced hip hop, arguably the most powerful artistic and cultural innovation of the past fifty years. Two narratives—urban crisis and cultural renaissance—have dominated understandings of the Bronx and other urban environments. Today, as gentrification transforms American cities economically and demographically, the twin narratives structure our thinking about urban life.

A Bronx native, Peter L’Official draws on literature and the visual arts to recapture the history, people, and place beyond its myths and legends. Both fact and symbol, the Bronx was not a decades-long funeral pyre, nor was hip hop its lone cultural contribution. L’Official juxtaposes the artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s carvings of abandoned buildings with the city’s trompe l’oeil decals program; examines the centrality of the Bronx’s infamous Charlotte Street to two Hollywood films; offers original readings of novels by Don DeLillo and Tom Wolfe; and charts the emergence of a “global Bronx” as graffiti was brought into galleries and exhibited internationally, promoting a symbolic Bronx abroad.

Urban Legends presents a new cultural history of what it meant to live, work, and create in the Bronx.