T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888–1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Milton Academy and Harvard University. In 1910, the year in which he earned his master's degree, he wrote one of his most famous poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a poem that was for its day radically experimental. During the pre-World War I period, Eliot attended the Sorbonne in Paris and studied Asian languages and religion. In 1915, following the outbreak of war, he moved to Oxford. A disappointment to his family, he supplemented his allowance by working as a bank teller. At the end of a difficult marriage to Vivian Haigh-Wood, Eliot received intensive psychiatric treatment for depression.

Then, with the help of another expatriate poet, Ezra Pound, he published "Prufrock" and caught the attention of the literary world. In 1922, again aided by Pound, Eliot published an even more challenging poem, "The Waste Land"—a view of the moral bankruptcy of the interwar period poised against what Eliot saw as the superior values of the past. In 1928, shortly after embracing British citizenship, Eliot became a member of the Church of England. He married Valerie Fletcher in 1957. In addition to his invaluable poetic achievements, Eliot made successful contributions to other literary forms, including plays and literary criticism. In 1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot was published in 1969.