An aging librarian's memories are stirred by a young woman. The woman is researching her Jewishness after learning that her parents converted to Christianity. The librarian's wife, too, was a Jewess and she committed suicide, despairing of the Holocaust.

"To accompany Eliot's poems, Ricks and McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the creative activity that came to constitute each poem, calling upon drafts, correspondence and other original materials to provide a vivid account of the poet's working processes, his reading, his influences and his revisions. This second volume opens with two books of verse: the children's verse of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and his translation of...

"Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism and illuminating new research, the author reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists - of Ezra Pound, who edited it, of Vivien Eliot, who sustained it, and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work"--Publisher's description.

"On the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot's modernist masterpiece, a rich cultural history of The Waste Land's creation, explosive impact, and enduring influence. When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put its 34-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. "But," as Jed Rasula writes, "The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a...

"A biography of T. S. Eliot from his birth in St. Louis in 1888 to his publication of The Waste Land in 1922"-- Provided by publisher.

Jazz-age Paris was the center of the artistic and literary world, and the center of the center was Gertrude Stein's salon, where the famous and aspiring creative talents gathered to gawk at Stein's Picassos and vie for status. Young Midwesterner Ida Caine arrives in Paris with her husband Teddy, a would-be Hemingway who thinks he can adventure first and write later. When Teddy falls in with the Stein set, he brings Ida to the salon, where she is shunted...