The notebook, in which the twenty-one-year old Thomas Stearns Eliot first began to enter the poems he had been writing at Harvard, is “quarter- bound in leather” with “marbled-paper sides”, and was purchased in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was here that the Eliot family took their summer vacations ...

The notebook, in which the twenty-one-year old Thomas Stearns Eliot first began to enter the poems he had been writing at Harvard, is “quarter- bound in leather” with “marbled-paper sides”, and was purchased in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was here that the Eliot family took their summer vacations during the 1900s.**

It has been in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library since 1958 but this is the first time that it has been made public. This book is a facsimile of the Notebook with facing transcriptions of around 60 poems, including the first transcription of Prufrock.

There is a most illuminating introduction by the internationally renowned writer and journalist, Robert McCrum, who places the publication of this volume in the context of major literary discoveries.