A riveting account of the making of T. S. Eliot’s celebrated poem The Waste Land on its centenary.

Praise for Matthew Hollis and Now All Roads Lead to France

“Excellent and absorbing.… A very intelligent and sympathetic study.”
— Allan Massie, Wall Street Journal

“An acute and unforgettable moving study of friendship and creativity.”
— Sunday Times Biography of the Year

“Engaging.… Hollis is adept at evoking the atmosphere of the time and at negotiating the complicated friendships and squabbles between… poets.… Hollis captures something far greater than a man’s personal life, and far more elusive: the desire and struggle to write.”
— Economist

“[An] elegant and melancholy biography.… Hollis makes the ingenious case that Thomas’s embrace of poetry after years of timid false starts was his greatest act of courage.”
— The New Yorker

“With calm grace and candid respect, Hollis gives contemporary relevance to the last powerful works of [Edward Thomas].”
— Times Books of the Year

“Brilliant and superbly written.… Thomas is fortunate indeed to have attracted a biographer who measures up to his own giant stature.”
— Sunday Telegraph

“[An] excellent account… beautifully structured by place, year and season.”
— Guardian

“The best book about poetry… moving and insightful.… By its end the book is the perfect setting for Thomas’s perfect poems.”
— Times Literary Supplement

“Thoughtful and scrupulous… a bravura critical performance.”
—Sunday Times

Renowned as one of the world’s greatest poems, The Waste Land has been said to describe the moral decay of a world after war and the search for meaning in a meaningless era. It has been labeled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a masterful fake. A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious.

In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism, and illuminating new research, he reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists—of Ezra Pound, who edited it; of Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind.