Harold Bloom, our preeminent literary critic, takes us from the Bible to twentieth-century writing, searching for the ways in which literature can inform our lives. Through comparisons of the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes; Plato and Homer; Cervantes and Shakespeare; Montaigne and Bacon; Johnson and Goethe; Emerson and Nietzsche; Freud and Proust; and finally a discussion of the Gospel of Thomas and St. Augustine, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? distills for us the various-and even contrary-forms of wisdom that have shaped our thinking.