In the period covered by this richly detailed collection, T. S. Eliot was to set a new course for his life and work. The demands of his professional life as writer and editor became more complex and exacting. The celebrated but financially-pressed periodical he had been editing since 1922—The Criterion: A Literary Review—switched between being a quarterly and a monthly; in addition to writing numerous essays and editorials, lectures, reviews, introductions and prefaces, his letters show Eliot involving himself wholeheartedly in the business of his new career as a publisher.

This correspondence with friends and mentors vividly documents all the stages of Eliot's personal and artistic transformation during these crucial years, the continuing anxieties of his private life, and the forging of his public reputation.