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A vivid portrait of the city that shaped T. S. Eliot's imagination.

At the turn of the twentieth century, St. Louis was a booming industrial center where smoke darkened the skies, segregation shaped everyday life, disease and pollution threatened public health, and a vibrant performance scene brought musical traditions together from across the world. The poet T. S. Eliot grew up in this dynamic city, absorbing its sights and sounds, which became defining features of literary modernism.

In Prelude in St. Louis, Frances Dickey reveals how this complex cityscape left an indelible mark on Eliot's imagination. Combining literary history with urban history, environmental humanities, and sensory studies, Dickey reconstructs the St. Louis that Eliot experienced through newspapers, maps, photographs, concert programs, civic records, and the poet's own writings, including newly available correspondence with Emily Hale. She traces how the city's sights, sounds, smells, and social divisions echoed throughout Eliot's poetry, illuminating recurring themes of memory, alienation, guilt, water, and music. Along the way, she offers a richly textured portrait of a city whose contradictions helped shape one of the twentieth century's most influential writers.

As much a study of St. Louis as it is a literary biography, Prelude in St. Louis offers a fresh perspective on Eliot's work while uncovering the environmental and social realities that informed his artistic vision. Engaging, original, and grounded in extensive archival research, this book will appeal to readers of literary history, modernism, urban studies, and anyone interested in the enduring relationship between place and creativity.