T. S. Eliot one of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect", though it was not well received by everyone. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the more secular "literati". In 1939, Eliot published a book of light verse, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's nickname for him). This first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover. In 1954, the composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra in a work titled "Practical Cats". After Eliot's death, the book was adapted as the basis
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do for people who do commercials") and football coach George Allen ("You have to put a priority on everything you do each day"). As the foreword to the book points out, "Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, 'for daily meaning as well as daily bread'... The oral histories in "Working" are wistful dispatches from a distant era...when management practices and computers were just beginning to transform the American workplace. In the last thirty years, productivity has soared but job satisfaction has plummeted. It is hard to read "Working" without wondering what has gone wrong." A bestseller