T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26th, 1888 in St Louis, Mo. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was the chairman of the board of a brick company and served the cultural institutions his father had helped found, as well as other men. His father married a woman named Charlotte Champ. “After having six children, she turned her energies to education and legal safeguards for the young,” (EWB, 1). Eliot grew up within his family’s tradition of service to religion, community, and education. He attended a private school called the Smith Academy, originally named thee Eliot Academy. There he wrote and read his valedictorian poem for his graduation in 1905 (EWB, 1).
Later in the next year, he was accepted and attended Harvard University. Eliot’s stay at Harvard was interrupted in 1909 by a year at Sorbonne University in Paris. He later returned to Harvard but decided to study abroad again in 1914. When WWI broke out, Eliot transferred to Oxford University and studied there. After Oxford, he moved back to England and met and married a woman named Vivienne Haigh Haigh -Wood. He found a teaching job at Highgate Junior School for boy and then later worked for Lloyd’s Bank. While teaching, Eliot wrote Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.
When the United States entered WWI in 1917, Eliot tried to join the U.S Navy but was rejected due to physical reasons. Later that same year his first volume of verse, Prufrock and other Observations appeared and almost instantly became the focus of discussion and controversy. After that, he became an editor for the Egoist, a feminist magazine. After begin an editor, Eliot work rose into the elite British circles. The Bloomsbury group lead by Leonard and Virginia Woolf welcomed him. In 1920, Eliot quietly assumed the leadership of England’s young intelligentsia (EWB, 3). Within 15 years, Eliot wrote some of his most famous poems, The Waste Land and Four Quartets. He also wrote a playwright called...