Abstract: As a preeminent figure in European Modernism, T.S. Eliot concentrates on European war crisis and moral degeneration from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Ralph Ellison, a modernist pioneer in African American literature, strives for identity and equality of the Blacks and for literary integration into the White mainstream. Both as modernist writers, Eliot and Ellison share similarities as well as differences. While they witnessed different literary traditions, they also showed concerns for the “other”, with “Ethiopia airs” as their literary inspiration. Motivated by their strong sense of professional mission as writers, they focused their interest on human fate and world order, hoping to challenge the existing social systems and soften this world of violence and chaos by means of their modernist artistic writing, which keep some distance from historical reality, demonstrating certain feature which transcends the mainstream modernism enriched in turn by the two writers' modernist perspectives which to some degree reflects the true motivation of the conscientious modernist writers and so deserves more attention from the scholarship.

Key words: T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Modernism, Ethiopian airs, human fate and world order