Written by the preeminent literary critic Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human offers a comprehensive reading of each of Shakespeare’s plays. At the same time, Bloom, whose numerous awards include the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, posits that Shakespeare not only reinvented the English language but also created the human nature as we understand it today. According to The New York Times, "Not perhaps since Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century has a critic explained to a general audience as ably as Mr. Bloom does how much Shakespeare matters to our sense of who we are."