T.S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 Sept. 1888-4 Jan. 1965) was a British-American poet and literary critic. Born in St. Louis Missouri to a prosperous family of unitarians and educated at Harvard, he would complete his education at Oxford eventually converting to Anglicanism and becoming a British Subject. Eliot was married twice, from 1915 - 1947 to Vivienne Haigh-Wood and to Valerie Fletcher from 1957 to his death.

Eliot produced most of his poetic output early in his career, making a strong mark on English-language modernist literature with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and The Hollow Men (1926). A decade later, Eliot began publishing his next major work, The Four Quartets (published in four parts, from 1936 to 1942). Besides these major works, though, the rest of Eliot's poetic output is rather small. In addition to his poetic works, Eliot wrote several plays and an influential body of literary criticism.