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Though John Crowley, author of Engine Summer, is perhaps not as well known as the most commercially successful American writers of the past fifty years, influential figures have championed his work, including the poet James Merrill and the literary critic Harold Bloom. In his afterword to Crowley's book Little, Big, Bloom praises the novel's adroit blend of what playwright Friedrich Schiller termed the naive and sentimental modes-while Schiller thought works could be classified as either naive (seeking to describe reality) or sentimental (seeking to develop ideas), Little, Big demonstrates that a work can be both.