Book to note: ‘Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land’

Forgive me for stumbling across the new biography of T.S. Eliot a couple months after most of the reviews appeared, but a Boston Globe review this past weekend caught my attention. Robert Crawford’s Young Eliot: From St. Louis to “The Waste Land” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) appears to provide a rich portrait of the great modernist poet’s roots in a prominent Unitarian family in St. Louis. That dimension of Eliot’s story isn’t exactly unknown, but Crawford had access to sources earlier biographers did not. Micah Mattix’s review in the Wall Street Journal provides a good summary.

From the UU World archives: Kimberly French profiled historian Cynthia Grant Tucker, who studied the letters and diaries of several generations of women in the Eliot family, in 2012. Suzanne Meyer told the story of the Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot’s civic contributions to St. Louis in 2006.