TS Eliot is the author of Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats. That’s a book of poems that will get transformed into one of the greatest broadway musicals of all time. In fact, it might be the Broadway musical – it so shaped what a Broadway musical is that it’s changed the way the world thinks about musicals at all.
But that wasn’t the poetry that put TS Eliot on the map. In fact, TS Eliot himself would have smash hits on Broadway during his lifetime…but none of them had anything to do with the poems or cats or anything other than his own, distant observations of his own failed marriage and his strange connection to very conservative religious beliefs.
And in the middle of all that, somehow, improbably, this guy has to write a children’s book about Cats.
How did that happen? What made TS Eliot tick, why did that result in a frightening move to the ugly right, and why was all that necessary for him to write Old Possum’s Practical Cats? We’ll curl up on a couch and find a nice, comfortable beam of sunlight as we share this saga in this episode of THM.
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