The Waste Land (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Eliot was born September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a bright and hardworking student, who experienced a classical, wide-ranging education. Eliot studied philosophy and French literature at Harvard. He also joined the staff of the university's literary journal, the Harvard Advocate, in which he first published parts of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." In 1909 he graduated from
Harvard with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, and he finished his master's degree in philosophy a year later. Over the next six years, he pursued further graduate studies in philosophy at a number of institutions in the United States and Europe, including Harvard, the Paris Sorbonne, Marburg in Germany, and Merton College, Oxford, ultimately completing his dissertation in 1916.

During the period of his studies, he met two people who would prove to be influential to his writing. The first was fellow poet Ezra Pound, who became Eliot's friend, mentor, and editor. The second was Vivien Haigh-Wood, whom he met and married in 1915 while studying in England. He and Vivien settled in London the same year, but they experienced a troubled relationship from the start, due in a large part to Vivien's neurotic illnesses. The dark tone of Eliot's poetry during the 1910s and 1920s is often attributed to his marriage. In 1915 Eliot started teaching at a London boys' schools, High Wycombe Grammar School, and continued his teaching the next year at Highgate Junior School, also in London. In 1917 Eliot left teaching to work in the Colonial and Foreign Department at Lloyds Bank in London, a position he held until 1925. At the same time he became assistant editor of the Egoist (1917 – 1919), in which he published Prufrock, and Other Observations (1917).

In 1921 the combined strain of his marriage, his bank job, and his writing and editing pursuits led Eliot to have a nervous breakdown. He recovered at a sanitorium in Switzerland, where in 1922 he completed his poem The Waste Land. Upon his return to London the same year, Eliot became the founding editor of the literary journal Criterion, at which he remained editor until 1939. At the suggestion of Pound, who also helped him in the endeavor, Eliot edited The Waste Land from about 800 lines to 433 before publishing it in late 1922, first in Criterion, then a month later in another literary journal, the Dial. The poem, which is largely credited with helping to launch the modern literature movement, shifted Eliot from a poet who was only moderately in the public consciousness to a poet who was alternately praised and vilified.

In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds to work as a literary editor at the publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber & Faber). In 1927 he became a naturalized British subject and a member of the Anglican Church, at which point, his work began to change thematically, addressing more religious issues. During the 1932 to 1933 academic year, Eliot was invited to Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. This physical separation from his wife, who stayed behind in London, ultimately led to their divorce.

During the 1930s Eliot began devoting much of his writing time to lectures and literary criticism, publishing such landmark works as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (1933) and After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934). Just as The Waste Land and Eliot's other works in that era helped to usher in the modernist period of literature, his critical work in the 1930s and 1940s is commonly acknowledged as a major catalyst for the rise of the New Criticism movement in England and the United States.

Also in the 1930s, Eliot wrote several plays. One of his first plays, The Rock: A Pageant Play (1934), was commissioned by the church and was overtly religious in its themes. His next play, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), was also commissioned by the church, and it is widely considered Eliot's most successful play.

Eliot wrote his last four major poetic works in the 1940s: East Coker (1940), Burnt Norton (1941), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942). Collectively these works were published as The Four Quartets (1943). In 1947 Eliot's life underwent another profound change, when his ex-wife died after having spent several years in an institution. Eliot met Valerie Fletcher, who became his secretary and eventually, in 1957, his wife. Unlike his previous marriage, Eliot was notably happy in this relationship.

In 1948 Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature and the English Order of Merit. These and many other awards, along with Eliot's general popularity as a dramatist, made the author a noted literary and public figure until his death and beyond. Eliot died January 4, 1965, in London, England, of emphysema and related complications.