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In 1917, the year he took a job at Lloyds Bank in London, a 28-year-old American from St. Louis published a pamphlet of twelve poems with a small London press. It opened with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Five years later came The Waste Land, 434 lines in five sections, cut down from a longer draft by Ezra Pound. In 1927 Eliot joined the Church of England and became a British citizen; in 1948 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He also wrote verse plays that ran on Broadway, and a book of cat poems for his godchildren that became the musical Cats. This guide covers his ten key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 key books · 1917–1963 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
T. S. Eliot’s best-known books are The Waste Land (1922), Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Four Quartets (1943), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). Start with Prufrock and Other Observations: twelve short early poems, led by “Prufrock”, that prepare you for the method of The Waste Land.
Where to Start with T. S. Eliot
If you want the shortest way in
→ Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) — twelve early poems, led by “Prufrock”.
If you want his defining poem
→ The Waste Land (1922) — the 1922 poem in five sections.
If you want his late religious poetry
→ Four Quartets (1943) — four long poems written between 1936 and 1942.
If you want something lighter
→ Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) — the cat poems behind Cats.
10 T. S. Eliot Books, in Order
Prufrock and Other Observations
His first book, a pamphlet of twelve poems published in June 1917 by The Egoist Ltd in London. It opens with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which Eliot began in 1910 and finished in 1911, and which Poetry magazine in Chicago had printed in June 1915 on Ezra Pound’s recommendation. Prufrock is a timid man on his way through city streets to a social call, who has “measured out my life with coffee spoons”.
The Sacred Wood
Twenty essays, published by Methuen in London and Knopf in New York. It includes “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, first printed in two parts in The Egoist, and “Hamlet and His Problems”, where Eliot first set out his idea of the “objective correlative”. Much of his influence as a critic starts here.
The Waste Land
A poem of 434 lines in five sections, from “The Burial of the Dead” to “What the Thunder Said”, moving between voices, scenes and quotations in several languages and ending with “Shantih shantih shantih”, the formal close of an Upanishad. It appeared in the first issue of The Criterion in October 1922 and in The Dial, then as a book from Boni & Liveright in New York in December 1922 and from the Hogarth Press in 1923. Ezra Pound cut the draft heavily, and Eliot dedicated it to him. The Dial gave Eliot its 2,000-dollar award that year.
Poems 1909–1925
The first collection from Faber & Gwyer, the firm Eliot joined as a director in 1925. It gathered his earlier poems and printed “The Hollow Men” in its final form for the first time. That poem has the epigraph “Mistah Kurtz – he dead”, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and ends: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Ash-Wednesday
A poem in five sections, written around his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism and sometimes called his “conversion poem”. It was first published in April 1930 in a signed edition of 600 copies, followed by ordinary editions in Britain and the United States. The first edition was dedicated “To my wife”, his first wife Vivienne; the dedication was dropped from later editions.
Murder in the Cathedral
A verse play about the killing of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, written at the request of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, for the Canterbury Festival. It was first performed on 15 June 1935 in the cathedral’s Chapter House. Four Tempters offer Becket safety, power, an alliance with the barons and, last, the glory of martyrdom. A film version won the Grand Prix at Venice in 1951.
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
Fourteen comic poems about cats, written in the 1930s in letters to his godchildren and signed “Old Possum”; a fifteenth was added in 1952. Faber published it on 5 October 1939 with a cover drawn by Eliot, and an edition illustrated by Nicolas Bentley followed in 1940. Its cast includes Macavity, Growltiger, the Rum Tum Tugger, Old Deuteronomy, Mr. Mistoffelees and Skimbleshanks. Andrew Lloyd Webber set the poems as the musical Cats (London 1981, Broadway 1982).
Four Quartets
Four long meditative poems on time, memory and faith, each named after a place: “Burnt Norton” (1936), a manor in Gloucestershire he visited with Emily Hale in 1934; “East Coker” (1940), a village in Somerset; “The Dry Salvages” (1941); and “Little Gidding” (1942). They were first collected in New York in 1943 and in London in 1944. Many critics regard it as his last great work.
The Cocktail Party
A verse comedy loosely based on Euripides’ Alcestis. Edward Chamberlayne’s wife Lavinia leaves him just before a cocktail party; a mysterious guest, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, brings her back, while Celia Coplestone takes a path that ends in martyrdom. It opened at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1949, ran for 409 performances on Broadway and won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play; Faber published it in 1950.
Collected Poems 1909–1962
The last collection of his poems published in his lifetime, by Faber in 1963, two years before his death. It brings together the poems from Prufrock through The Waste Land, Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets in one volume.
In What Order to Read T. S. Eliot
Eliot’s poetry is short enough to read in publication order, and that order shows a clear arc: the city poems of Prufrock, the fractured voices of The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men”, then, after his conversion in 1927, the religious poetry of Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets.
Read The Waste Land after the Prufrock poems rather than first, and expect to read it more than once. The plays and essays can come later and in any order; Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats stands apart from everything else and can be read at any point.
A reading path
1. Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
2. The Waste Land (1922)
3. Four Quartets (1943)
4. Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
5. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939)
Everything Else T. S. Eliot Published
Beyond the 10 key books: 16 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other poetry editions
3
3 books · 1919–1936
- 1919Poemsan early pamphlet printed by the Hogarth Press
- 1920Ara Vos Prechis 1920 London collection; the New York edition that year was titled Poems
- 1936Collected Poems 1909–1935the first appearance of “Burnt Norton”
Other plays
5
5 books · 1932–1959
- 1932Sweeney Agonistesan unfinished verse drama
- 1934The Rocka pageant play
- 1939The Family Reunionverse play
- 1954The Confidential Clerkverse comedy
- 1959The Elder Statesmanhis last play, first staged in 1958
Essays and lectures
5
5 books · 1933–1957
- 1933The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticismlectures
- 1934After Strange Godslectures he never republished
- 1939The Idea of a Christian Societyessay on religion and society
- 1948Notes Towards the Definition of Cultureessay on culture
- 1957On Poetry and Poetslater essays
Published after his death
3
3 books · 1971–1996
- 1971The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Draftswith Pound’s annotations, edited by Valerie Eliot
- 1988The Letters of T. S. Eliotvolume 1 of the collected letters; volume 10 appeared in 2025
- 1996Inventions of the March Hareearly poems 1909–1917, edited by Christopher Ricks
The years · 1888–1965
Quick facts about T. S. Eliot
- Known for
- Writing The Waste Land, the fragmented, many-voiced poem of 1922 that became a landmark of modernist poetry in English, and, less expectedly, the cat poems behind the musical Cats.
- 1888
- Born in St. Louis, Missouri
- 1922
- The Waste Land
- 1927
- Becomes a British citizen
- 1948
- Nobel Prize in Literature
- 1965
- Dies in London
- Born
- 26 September 1888, St. Louis, Missouri
- Died
- 4 January 1965, at home in Kensington, London, of emphysema
- Education
- Harvard (BA 1909), the University of Paris, and Merton College, Oxford
- Worked
- Lloyds Bank, 1917–1925; then a director at Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber)
- Citizenship
- British from November 1927, renouncing his US citizenship
- Married
- Vivienne Haigh-Wood (1915) and Valerie Fletcher (1957)
- Honours
- Nobel Prize in Literature and Order of Merit, both 1948
The red mark is 1922: The Waste Land, published in The Criterion in October and as a book in December.
How T. S. Eliot Writes: Fragments, Voices and Quotation
Eliot builds poems from fragments. The Waste Land cuts between a pub conversation, a typist’s evening, a drowned sailor and lines quoted from Dante, Shakespeare and the Upanishads, without telling you who is speaking. Even “The Hollow Men” was assembled from shorter poems he had published separately in 1924 and 1925.
His criticism explains the method. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” he argued that a poet writes with the whole of earlier literature in mind and should keep his own personality out of the poem; in “Hamlet and His Problems” he called for an “objective correlative”, a set of objects or events that carries an emotion instead of naming it. That is why his poems give images and scenes rather than statements of feeling.
After his conversion in 1927 the voice changes: Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets are slower and more meditative, and much of his later energy went into verse plays meant for ordinary theatres, from Murder in the Cathedral to The Cocktail Party. Editing mattered too: Ezra Pound’s cuts shaped The Waste Land, and the drafts with his notes were published in facsimile in 1971.
Listen
T. S. Eliot Reads The Waste Land
The Poetry Archive presents recordings of T. S. Eliot reading his own work, including a 1933 recording of The Waste Land. From the archive of the Poetry Archive.
Frequently asked questions about T. S. Eliot’s books
How many books has T. S. Eliot written?
About two dozen in his lifetime, mostly short: slim poetry collections, seven plays and several volumes of essays. Ten are the key books on this page, from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Collected Poems 1909–1962 (1963); the other sixteen, including posthumous editions, are listed under “Everything else”.
What are T. S. Eliot’s books in order?
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), The Sacred Wood (1920), The Waste Land (1922), Poems 1909–1925 (1925), Ash-Wednesday (1930), Murder in the Cathedral (1935), Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), Four Quartets (1943), The Cocktail Party (1950) and Collected Poems 1909–1962 (1963).
Where should I start with T. S. Eliot?
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917): twelve short poems, beginning with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Then read The Waste Land. If you want everything in one book, buy Collected Poems 1909–1962.
What is T. S. Eliot’s most famous book?
The Waste Land (1922), a poem of 434 lines in five sections that opens with “April is the cruellest month”. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Four Quartets are the other works most often read and taught.
Is T. S. Eliot’s work antisemitic?
This has been debated for decades. Early poems such as “Gerontion” and “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” contain hostile portrayals of Jews, and in the lectures published as After Strange Gods (1934) he wrote that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable”; he never republished that book. Anthony Julius, in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, argued that the antisemitism is unmistakable, a view supported by critics including Harold Bloom and Christopher Ricks. Craig Raine defended Eliot in In Defence of T. S. Eliot (2001).
Did T. S. Eliot win the Nobel Prize?
Yes. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”. He received the Order of Merit the same year.
Is the musical Cats based on T. S. Eliot?
Yes. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, which opened in London in 1981 and on Broadway in 1982, is based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). Eliot was awarded two Tony Awards for it posthumously in 1983, for Best Book of a Musical and, shared with Lloyd Webber, Best Original Score.
What did Ezra Pound do to The Waste Land?
He edited the draft heavily, cutting a large amount of material and rejecting both “Gerontion” as a prelude and a Heart of Darkness epigraph. Eliot dedicated the poem to him as “il miglior fabbro”, the better craftsman. The drafts with Pound’s notes were published in facsimile in 1971.
Was T. S. Eliot American or British?
Both. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888 and studied at Harvard, moved to England in 1914, and became a British citizen in November 1927, giving up his American citizenship.
When did T. S. Eliot die?
On 4 January 1965, at his home in Kensington, London, of emphysema. His ashes are in St Michael and All Angels’ Church in East Coker, Somerset, and a memorial stone was placed in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, in 1967.
Footnotes
- T. S. Eliot — Wikipedia
- T. S. Eliot bibliography — Wikipedia
- The Waste Land — Wikipedia
- T.S. Eliot — Facts — NobelPrize.org
- The Cocktail Party — Wikipedia
- Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats — Wikipedia
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land”
— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), the opening lines
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