American-British poet, playwright, literary critic and editor; he was a leader of the modernistic movement in poetry. Eliot was awarded both the British Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Born into a distinguished New England family and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, he got not pressure to be “practical” and go into business. From private high schools he went on to Harvard University from 1906 to 1909, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in three years. He went to France, attending philosophy lectures at the Sorbonne and reading poetry, including Dante, John Webster, John Donne, and Jules Laforge, the French Symbolist. These studies helped him find his own voice and style. From 1911 to 1914 he studied Sanskrit and read Indian philosophy back at Harvard. During that period he read Bradley’s “Appearance and Reality” and by 1916 he had finished a dissertation on it, but World War I prevented his return to take the final oral examination for the Doctor of Philosophy degree. In 1914 he established residence in London and in 1927 he was confirmed in the Church of England and became a British subject. Also in 1914 he met the American poet, Ezra Pound, and began a close association with him.
He was briefly a teacher and a bank clerk and meanwhile was a prolific reviewer and writer in both literary criticism and technical philosophy. In 1919 he published “Poems” which included “Gerontion,” a meditative interior monologue in blank verse like nothing before published in English. His career as an editor was always secondary to his main interests. From 1922 to 1939 he edited his own quarterly, the Criterion, which was the most distinguished international critical journal of its time. In 1925 he started working for the publishing house of Faber and Faber where he eventually became a director.
Probably one of the most erudite English poets of his time, his first important published work and the first masterpiece of modernism in English was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” With the publication of his most famous poem about the disenchantment and disgust after World War I, “The Waste Land,” in 1922 Eliot earned an international reputation.
His later poetry and plays included his masterpiece, “The Four Quartets,” which was published as a book in 1943. The four poems made quite an impression on the public and led to the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the British Order of Merit in 1948. He won many other awards for his work. His plays, which began with “Sweeney Agonistes,” published in 1926 and ended with “The Elder Statesman” in 1958 are considered inferior to his lyrical, meditative poetry.
Eliot kept his private life rigorously to himself. He married Vivian Haigh-Wood in 1915, and after she became mentally ill they lived apart until she died in 1947. In January 1957 he married Valerie Fletcher and lived happily with her until his death on 1/04/1965, London.
Link to Wikipedia biography