Contains full color photographs of scenes from Cats, lyrics and dialogue, with production notes.

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 30. Chapters: T. S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Elaine Paige, Trevor Nunn, Gillian Lynne, Betty Buckley, Memory, Growltiger's Last Stand, Gus: The Theatre Cat, The Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles. Excerpt: Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965) was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock-started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915-is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement. He followed this with what have become some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a bourgeois family originally from New England, who had moved to St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843-1919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis. Eliot credits his hometown with seeding 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." His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843-1929), wrote poetry and was a...

A musical based on Old Possum's book of practical cats by T.S. Eliot.