Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888, the youngest of seven children. The family is of English origin, the American line descending from Andrew Eliot who went to Massachusetts from the Somerset village of East Coker in the 17th Century.
T.S. Eliot was educated at Harvard, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at Merion College, Oxford. His early poetry was profoundly influenced by the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Laforgue. In his academic studies he specialised in philosophy and logic. His doctorial thesis was on F.H. Bradley.
He settled in England in 1915, the year in which he married, and also met his contemporary Ezra Pound for the first time. He taught briefly at High Wycombe Grammar School. and in 1916 spent four years at Highgate Junior School, where John Betjeman, aged ten, was one of his pupils.
In March 1917 he joined Lloyd bank in the City of London, in the foreign and colonial department. In this year he published his first volume of poems. Prufrock and Other Observations. His second book,Poems, 1919 was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. The Secret Wood, a collection of critical essays, appeared in 1920. His most famous work, The Wasted Land, came out in 1922 in the first issue of the quarterly The Criterion, which he edited. Three years later he left the bank to become a director of the publishing House of Faber.
There have been various collected editions of his poems, and volumes of his literary and social criticisms, notably Selected Essays, On Poetry and Poets and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.
During the nineteen-twenties he frequented the ballet, the theatre and the London music halls, especially the Palladium. He wrote a celebrated tribute to Marie Lloyd on her death in 1922. His verse writing for the theatre began with Sweeney Agonistes fragments in 1927. He wrote London churches’ pageant play The Rock in 1934. Murder in the Cathedral, about the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, was commissioned for the Canterbury Festival of 1935. It was later filmed. The Family Reunion was first performed at the Westminster Theatre in 1939, with Michael Redgrave as Lord Monchensey. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats appeared in October 1939. (Possum was Eliot’s alias among his friends).Four Quartets, now generally regarded as his masterpiece, began with Burn Norton in 1936; continued with East Coker in 1940, The Dry Salvages in 1941 and Little Gigging in 1942. The separate poems were gathered together in 1943.
Eliot received the Order of Merit in January 1948, and in the autumn of the same year was awarded the Nobel Prize For Literature. Among many other honours and distinctions he was an Officier de La Legion D’Honneur. He was awarded the Hanseatic Goethe Prize 1954, and the Dante Gold Medal 1959.
He subsequently wrote three more verse plays, each of which had its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival: The Cocktail Party 1949, The Confidential Clerk 1953 and The Elder Statesman 1958.
Eliot married for the second time in 1957. He died in London in January 1965. The is a memorial to him in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, beside those to Tennyson and Browning. His ashes rest in St Michael’s Church, East Coker.