After the centennial of Eliot's birth, a number of new essays about his work appeared, giving a more contemporary perspective on his writing and its influence. The 1991 collection The Placing of T. S. Eliot, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker, shows what writers think with the benefit of distance over time.

Eliot writes on the subject of faith and its relation to art and culture in Christianity and Culture, comprised of two of his essays, "The Idea of a Christian Society'' and"Notes Toward the Definition of Culture," published in 1960 by Dimensions Books.

Murder in the Cathedral (1935), Eliot's play about the assassination of Thomas Becket in the twelfth century, is probably his best-known play.

Eliot's groundbreaking essays on literary theory are collected in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism- Studies in the Relationship of Criticism to Poetry in England. Harvard University Press reprinted this important work in 1986.

The master of the kind of witty British drawing-room comedy Eliot satirizes here is Noel Coward. Among Coward's most popular plays about upper-class characters socializing are Private Lives (1930), Hay Fever (produced 1925), and Blithe Spirit (1941).