October: The Cruelest Month or Prelude to Halloween, Holidays and Spring?

“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the opening of The Waste Land,* published 99 years ago in October,1922. He characterized: “Winter kept us warm…” and “Summer surprised us,” but autumn isn’t mentioned in his epic poem.

Decades later a very different apocalyptic voice Hunter Thompson declared, “October is the cruelest month,” at least in any election year because “by then, the pain is so great that even the strong are like jelly and time has lost all meaning for anybody still inv...