Yes, April is the cruellest month -- as Harcourt Brace, longtime publisher of T.S. Eliot, knows full well. As part of its promotions to take advantage of the second annual National P try Month this April, and its recent release of the 75th-anniversary edition of The Waste Land, the publisher, in conjunction with the Academy of American P ts, will distribute thousands of free copies of the new edition (a $4 Harvest trade paperback) on Tax Day, April 15. Books will be given out at post offices in six cities: New York, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Miami and Washington, D.C.
Booksellers aren't left out of the Eliot tie-in; they can display this title alongside Harcourt's simultaneous release of the first U.S. edition of Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, a private collection of Eliot's early p ms first published to considerable sensation last year in Britain. The collection includes a dozen pages of bawdy verse that Eliot shared with Ezra Pound and other friends, as well as an unused passage from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The collection is annotated by Christopher Ricks, a professor at Boston University and author of several works on Eliot. And the new edition of The Waste Land ends not with a whimper, but with a new afterword, also written by Ricks.
