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Life
Life
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St Louis, Missouri, the son of a New England schoolteacher and a St Louis merchant. He attended Harvard University and, from 1910-1911, he studied at the Sorbonne, then returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy. He later moved back to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood after knowing her for only three months and began his professional life in London, working at first as a teacher and later for Lloyd’s Bank. Eliot became a British citizen in 1927.
When Harvard offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship, he accepted and left his wife in England. After 1933, when Vivienne's mental health became especially precarious, they separated and she died in 1947. In January 1957 he married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Eliot died in London, on 4 January 1965
Work
Work
T.S. Eliot was a poet, a literary critic, a dramatist, an editor, and a publisher. In 1910 and 1911 he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” published in Poetry magazine. His poem collections include "The Hollow Man" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1927), "Old possum's Book of Pracitical Cats" (1939), "Four Quartets" (1936-1945) and "The Waste Land" (1922).
He also notably wrote some plays: "Murder in the Cathedral" in 1935, "The Cocktail Party" that won the Tony Awards for Best Play in 1950.
"Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats" was famously adapted in 1981 into the musical "Cats", which won seven Tony Awards.
Critical and editorial work
Critical and editorial work
1916-1921, he contributed a thousand reviews and articles to various periodicals. He was also a renowed editor and a publisher. 1922-1939, Eliot edited a major journal, the Criterion, and from 1925 to 1965, he was an editor and a director in the publishing house of Faber & Faber.
Controversies and disclaimer
Controversies and disclaimer
T. S. Eliot’s reputation has long been accompanied by significant controversy, particularly concerning his social and political views: "After Strange Gods" was banned from being reprinted because of its message.
The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.
This project does not seek to endorse these view, but it aims to present Eliot’s "The Waste Land" and its themes critically.
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