Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, to an upper-crust New England family but moved to the UK at the time of the outbreak of World War I, aged 25. When he was 39 in 1927, he renounced his American citizenship and became British. He is regarded as one of the 20th Century’s most significant man of letters writing in English, with ground-breaking poetry, drama, criticism and editorial work to his name.

Best known perhaps for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), The Waste Land (1922), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Four Quartets (1943). He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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