Valerie Eliot it." Following T. S. Eliot's 1965 death, Valerie Eliot was his most important editor and literary executor, having brought to press "The Waste Land: Facsimile and Manuscripts of the Original Drafts" (1971) and " The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922" (1989). She assisted Christopher Ricks with his edition of "The Inventions of the March Hare" (1996), a volume of Eliot's unpublished verse. A long-delayed second volume of T. S. Eliot's letters was also edited by her. One of Valerie Eliot's most lucrative decisions as executor was granting permission for a stage musical to be based on her
T. S. Eliot Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot "would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living." Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."