EBOOK
About
The extraordinary career and devastating life of T.S. Eliot. Eliot is a hollow man trapped in a dreary world. Working at the bank, a slave to the clock, the same routine, day after day. While London's elite enjoy a Great Gatsby lifestyle and poets like Robert Frost are rock stars, attracting thousands of fans to each reading, T.S. Eliot walks past life, peering at it through cracks or around corners. A world in color only in his stark imagination. Then one day he comes across Jack, an out and proud gay man being badly beaten, and something compels him to intervene. Life will never be the same. Jack introduces Eliot to the gay underground of early 20th Century London and to feelings Eliot had crammed down and locked away. And with freedom comes poetry. Extraordinary poetry that takes London by storm. But as Eliot's fame increases, pressure for conformity does as well. Religious intolerance, fascism's increasingly popular message of traditional values and the allure of untold success present Eliot with a decision that could have devastating consequences. The Wasteland is the untold story of T.S. Eliot, his secret struggle with being gay, the people left in the wake of his meteoric career trajectory and the madness that helped produce his greatest work.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"Strained from historical fact, The Wasteland is a fictionalized glimpse into the conflicted mind of T. S. Eliot."
Danielle Ballantyne
"The novel has a rhythmic, poetic style, including much rhyming, which works well as an intense look inside Eliot's conflicted mind . . . The Wasteland offers an inventive, albeit highly speculative, unmasking of the deeply reserved, guarded poet."
Charles Green
"The style is self-consciously poetic, presumably in homage to Eliot himself, and at times borders on self-indulgence. But when contrasted with the plaintive realism of its subject matter, it works. A readable and compelling novel that will be of most interest to readers who already know Eliot's work."
Jackie Drohan