From one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, a beloved professor who has taught the Bard for over half a century--an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Lear, arguably Shakespeare's most tragic and compelling character, the third in a series of five short books hailed as Harold Bloom's "last love letter to the shaping spirit of his imagination" ( The New York Times Book Review ) . King Lear is one of the most famous and compelling characters in literature. The aged, abused monarch--a man in his eighties, like Bloom himself--is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from grace and widely agreed to be Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding--over the course of his own lifetime--of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare's characters make. Now he brings that insight to his "measured, thoughtful assessment of a key play in the Shakespeare canon" ( Kirkus Reviews ). " Lear is a "short, superb book that has a depth of observation acquired from a lifetime of study" ( Publishers Weekly ).