T.S. Eliot was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, into a distinguished New England family, and his mother was a poet.

Eliot was educated at Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and the University of Oxford. He became a resident of London in 1915, and a naturalized British citizen in 1927. Between 1915 and 1919 Eliot worked several jobs, including those of teacher, bank clerk, and assistant editor of the literary magazine Egoist. He quickly distinguished himself as a poet and a critic.

Eliot is best know for his poem The Wasteland (1922), which was published in five parts. His first important piece, however, was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), published when the poet was twenty-seven. Later, he produced poems such as Ash Wednesday (1930), The Rock (1934), and Four Quartets (1943), which is generally considered by critics to be Eliot's best poem.

Eliot recieved many awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 and the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

Eliot established himself as a playwright with the successful production of The Cocktail Party (1949), but also wrote The Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1958), Sweeney Agonistes (1932) and The Family Reunion (1939), and the prose works The Idea of a Christian Society (1940) and Notes Toward a Definition of Culture (1948).