Eliot After “The Waste Land”

The second volume of Robert Crawford’s definitive biography records the untold story of T. S. Eliot’s adult life, from his relationship with Emily Hale to his momentous later works.

After being kept from the public for more than fifty years at Princeton University, the letters between T. S. Eliot and his longtime love and muse Emily Hale were unsealed in 2020. Drawing on these intimate exchanges, countless interviews, archives, and personal papers, as well as Eliot’s own poetry and prose, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford has completed his definitive biography of Eliot. This long-awaited second volume, Eliot After "The Waste Land," tells the story of the adult Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his complex interior life.

The first volume traced Eliot’s life from St. Louis to the publication of his revolutionary poem The Waste Land and closed at an inflection point in the Nobel laureate’s career. Crawford picks up where he left off, tackling the poet’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, his Nobel Prize, his editorship at Faber and Faber, and his great work Four Quartets.

Young Eliot: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land" was hailed as “exceptional” and “assiduous” (The New York Times). Crawford’s meticulous, incisive scholarship continues in Eliot After "The Waste Land," an invaluable record of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet, and troubled man.