T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Poet

Thomas Stearns ('T.S.') Eliot

Sitter in 66 portraits
Missouri-born, Eliot settled in England before the First World War. Working in Lloyd's Bank, he published Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), and Poems (1919), hand-printed at the Hogarth Press by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Eliot founded The Criterion in 1922, publishing The Waste Land in the first issue. In 1925 he joined Faber & Faber, and established a reputation for promoting younger writers including W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. He became a British subject in 1927. Later work included Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Four Quartets (1935-42). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.