Lyndall Gordon traces Eliot's journey across the 'waste land' to his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism at the age of 38. The American influences of his youth are emphasized, and the shadowy period from 1910 to 1914 in Paris and Boston emerges as a time of acute stress, of conflicting sexual and religious fantasies. 'The Waste Land' goes back to this time, and the author shows how the poem evolved from private meditations, later masked by the contemporary scenes that made it appear so dazzlingly modern. Gordon also traces Eliot's search for a 'new life' during the last 38 years of his life. This volume is a condensed and updated version of the two books previously publshed as ELIOT'S EARLY YEARS and ELIOT'S NEW LIFE.