T. S. Eliot in 1923 by Lady Ottoline Morrell
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| Birth name | Thomas Stearns Eliot | | Birth date | 26 September 1888 | | Place of birth | St. Louis, Missouri | | Date of death | 4 January 1965(age 76) | | Death place | London, England | | Citizenship | American by birth; British from 1927 | | Education | A.B. in philosophy | | Alma mater | Harvard University
Merton College, Oxford | | Occupation | Poet, dramatist, literary critic | | Period | 1905 - 1965 | | Influenced by | Dante Alighieri, Matthew Arnold, Jules Laforgue, John Donne, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Charles Baudelaire | | Influenced | Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Allen Tate, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney | | Literary movement | Modernism | | Children | none | | Awards | Nobel Prize for Literature (1948), Order of Merit (1948) |
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Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965) was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement. He followed this with what have become some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Eliot went east for college and was educated at Harvard. After graduation, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne for a year, and then won a scholarship to Oxford in 1914. An expatriate, he became a British citizen at the age of 39. "[M]y poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England," he said of his nationality and its role in his work. "It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good ... if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America." Eliot is quoted as having said: "My mind may be American but my heart is British."
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