The Seven Deadly Virtues and Other Lively Essays: Coming of Age As a Writer, Teacher, Risk Taker

Ranging from the comic to the confessional, Bloom's memoir interweaves the pleasures and problems of a forbidden marriage and complex family, the joys of cooking and travel, the struggles to become a professor during an era that did not welcome women faculty, and the risks and rewards of heeding the siren call of creative nonfiction. These fifteen essays probe the assumptions and values--ethical, intellectual, social, aesthetic, and inevitably political--of what Bloom has found to be the most complicated, challenging, satisfying aspects of her loves and labors.

Emblematic of Bloom's methods for teaching teachers, her swiftly flowing prose is spiced with bold opinions, leavened with playful wit, and rich with revealing details as she surveys the defining moments in her personal life and in an academic field in which she has been a central figure. Failure, success, perplexity, resilience, and wonderment all rise to the surface in a series of accounts that confide much about what is at stake for a writer, teacher, or woman striving to grow beyond conventional expectations. Her message is an open invitation to share in the exhilarating liberation of living and writing on the edge, far from the nay-saying of the seven deadly virtues and their acolytes, and where limitless creative possibilities abound.