Editing Allan Bloom (section)

==''Love and Friendship''==
Bloom's last book, which he dictated while partially paralyzed and in the hospital, and which was published posthumously, was ''Love and Friendship''. The book offered interpretations on the meaning of love, through a reading of novels by [[Stendhal]], [[Jane Austen]], and [[Gustave Flaubert|Flaubert]]; [[Leo Tolstoy|Tolstoy]] in light of Rousseau's influence on the [[Romantic movement]]; plays by William Shakespeare; [[Michel de Montaigne|Montaigne's]] ''[[Essays (Montaigne)|Essays]]''; and Plato's ''[[Symposium (Plato)|Symposium]]''.

Describing its creation, Bellow wrote:

{{blockquote|Allan was an academic, but he was a literary man too&nbsp;— he had too much intelligence and versatility, too much humanity, to be confined to a single category ... He didn't like these helpful-to-the-sick cliches or conventional get-well encouragements ... [S]till partially paralyzed and unable even to sign his name, he dictated a book ... I mention this because it was a remarkable thing for a sick man and a convalescent to do and because it was equally remarkable that a political philosopher should choose at such a moment in his life to write about literature ... I like to think that his free and powerful intelligence, responding to great inner impulses under the stimulus of life-threatening sickness, turned to the nineteenth-century novel, to Shakespeare's love plays, and to the Platonic Eros, summoning us to the great poetry of affects and asking us to see what has happened to our own deepest feelings in this age of artificial euphorias.<ref>Saul Bellow, ''It All Adds Up'' (Penguin, 2007), pp. 277–279.</ref>}}

Of the work, [[Andrew Sullivan]] wrote that "you cannot read <nowiki>[Bloom]</nowiki> on ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]'' or ''[[Antony and Cleopatra]]'' without seeing those works in a new light. You cannot read his account of Rousseau's ''[[Julie, or the New Heloise|La nouvelle Heloise]]'' without wanting to go back and read it—more closely—again ... Bloom had a gift for reading reality—the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it".<ref name="Longing 2000" /> Recollecting his friend in an interview, Bellow said "Allan inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air ... People only want the factual truth. Well, the truth is that Allan was a very superior person, great-souled. When critics proclaim the death of the novel, I sometimes think they are really saying that there are no significant people to write about. [But] Allan was certainly one."<ref>{{Citation | url = https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/apr/15/fiction | title = The wordly mystic's late bloom | first = James | last = Wood | newspaper = The Guardian | location = UK | date = April 14, 2000 | access-date = May 19, 2013 | archive-date = December 17, 2017 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20171217014951/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/apr/15/fiction | url-status = live }}</ref>