Allan Bloom

Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon and Alexandre Kojve. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, cole Normale Suprieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago. Bloom championed the idea of Great Books education and became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Characterized as a conservative in the popular media, Bloom denied that he was a conservative, and asserted that what he sought to defend was the theoretical life. Saul Bellow wrote Ravelstein, a roman clef based on Bloom, his friend and colleague at the University of Chicago.

Allan Bloom was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1930 to secondgeneration Jewish parents who were both social workers. The couple had had a daughter, Lucille, two years earlier. As a thirteenyearold, Bloom read a Readers Digest article about the University of Chicago and told his parents he wanted to attend his parents thought it was unreasonable and did not encourage his hopes. Yet, when his family moved to Chicago in 1944, his parents met a psychiatrist and family friend whose son was enrolled in the University of Chicagos humanities program for gifted students. In 1946, Bloom was accepted to the same program, starting his degree at the age of fifteen, and spending the next decade of his life enrolled at the University in Chicagos Hyde Park neighborhood. This began his lifelong passion for the idea of the university.

Source: Wikipedia