T.S. Eliot, 1888 - 1965

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He entered Harvard in 1906, and was influenced by Irving Babbitt, George Santayana, anti-Romanticism, Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, the Italian Renaissance, and Indian mystical philosophy. He studied the philosophical works of English Idealist F. H. Bradley, and eventually did his Harvard dissertation on him. T. S. Eliot later studied philosophy and literature in Germany and France. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, T. S. Eliot went to England where he studied Greek philosophy at Oxford, taught school in London, and later worked for Lloyd's Bank.

Eliot started writing literary and philosophical review shortly after this. He wrote for the Athenaeum and the Times Literary Supplement, and was assistant editor for the Egoist from 1917-1919. In 1922 he founded the successful quarterly Criterion, which he edited till 1939. His poetry was first published in 1915, when The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock appeared in Poetry magazine. His first collection was published in 1917 as Prufrock and Other Observations. A couple other smaller collections appeared in 1919 and 1920, then in 1922 The Waste Land was published first in the Criterion, then in the Dial, and finally in book form. In 1925 he published Poems 1909-25. At the same time he was publishing his critical essays and had several published between 1920 and 1932. In 1925 he became a director of the London publishing firm Faber and Faber, formerly known as Faber and Gwyer. In 1927 he became a British subject and joined the Church of England.

Eliot's personal life was quite turbuIent. 1915 he married an English writer named Vivienne Haigh-Wood. The marriage, unfortunately, was not a happy one. His wife was highly neurotic and constantly sick. This had a profound effect on Eliot, and by November 1921 he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As a result, on medical advice, he went to recuperate in a Swiss sanitorium. After two months he returned, making a stop in Paris to give Ezra Pound the manuscript for The Wasteland. He eventually left his wife in 1933, and she was later committed to a mental home where she died in 1947. A decade later Eliot married again, and was happy for the remaining eight years of his life.

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