T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in St Louis, Missouri, educated at Harvard – contracted an unhappy marriage with an Englishwoman, Vivien Haigh-Wood – and ended up in London. Of the little poetry he wrote, most of the famous things had appeared before he was thirty-four, including The Waste Land, generally considered the greatest poem of the twentieth century. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and died in 1965.

For more about The Life of T. S. Eliot, read his biographer Lyndall Gordon at tseliot.com.