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About the author

The Exploring The Waste Land website has been put together as a labor of love by Rickard A. Parker. Rick has an uncommon name. While his surname in English, his given name is Scandanavian and often thought to be Richard (please note, it's Rickard with a K, not an H but the C is still there.)

Rick can be contacted via e-mail at raparker@theworld.com

Qualification statements Do I have a doctorate? No Am I a professor? No Am I a teacher? No Was I an English major? No An English minor? No Did I ever have a poetry class? Yes! One undergraduate course

It's a hobby The site was designed, researched, coded and written by Rickard A. Parker (Sounds a lot like "produced, directed, written by and starring Woody Allen" doesn't it?) As implied by the use of the word hobby above, it is a labor of love. I make no money off the site (and, in fact, I currently pay my ISP when visitor's come.) I haven't produced the site on behalf of anyone. I make no claims to authority on The Waste Land or T.S. Eliot. However, I have done a lot of research and given much thought on how to present The Waste Land in a way that allows visitors with different degrees of background in English literature to learn more about this difficult poem and maybe have some fun doing so.

Qualifications My qualifications do not include any professional work in literature at all. I am a software engineer and my university background has been in the environmental, physical and computer sciences (oddly once having a summer job with the forest service while studying oceanography.) On the other hand, this background is good for website design and programming the perl scripts used to be able to keep this site under control.

The commentary I've attempted to clearly seperate my opinions from both facts and commonly believed "truths", partly to allow vistors to learn on their own from the mini-library that this site is and partly to protect unwary novice scholars from being chastised by their teachers (read flunked) because they present my unorthodox views of the poem as a standard reading of the poem.

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