T. S. Eliot was one of the most important poets and critics of the twentieth century, a central figure of literary modernism whose work transformed English-language poetry. Born Thomas Stearns Eliot in St. Louis, Missouri, into a distinguished New England family, he studied at Harvard before settling permanently in England, where he eventually became a British subject.
Working at first as a bank clerk and later as a publisher, Eliot announced a new poetic sensibility with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and, above all, with The Waste Land (1922) — a fragmented, allusive, despairing portrait of a civilization in ruins after the First World War that became the defining poem of the modern age. Densely learned and formally daring, his verse, supported by his influential criticism, reshaped how poetry was written and read.
In 1927 Eliot converted to Anglo-Catholicism and became a British citizen, and his later poetry, culminating in the meditative religious sequence Four Quartets (1943), turned toward faith and spiritual reconciliation.
He was also a successful verse dramatist — Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party — and the lighthearted Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats later became the basis for the musical Cats. As an editor and critic he wielded enormous influence over modern literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 and died in London in 1965.