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Though John Crowley, author of Flint and Mirror, is perhaps not as well known as the most commercially successful American writers of the past fifty years, his work has had several influential champions, including the poet James Merrill and the literary critic Harold Bloom. In his afterword to Crowley's book Little, Big, Bloom praises how the novel adroitly blends 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 fuses both modes of writing.