In his old age T.S. Eliot said on a number of occasions that the American experience of his childhood and youth had had the deepest influence on his poetry. This is the first book to explore in detail how Eliot's writings at once preserved and reacted against his complex American heritage: his intellectually and socially prominent family, their strong Unitarian culture, and their experience in nineteenth-century St. Louis and Boston. Analyzing major poems from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" through The Waste Land, and drawing widely upon the early philosophical writings, essays, and...