Thomas Stearns (“T. S.”) Eliot (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965) was a poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic. He was born in St. Louis to a family with deep roots in Boston. He was educated at Smith Academy, Milton Academy, and Harvard College, earning a degree in philosophy. He immigrated to England in 1914 and became a British subject in 1927 at about the time he converted to Catholicism. He first achieved recognition with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1915, hailed as a Modernist masterpiece, and established his voice as a major poet with the Waste Land in 1922.  He worked outside the realm of poetry for most of his adult years, finding a position at Lloyd’s bank in 1917 and moving to the publishing business in 1925 at Faber and Faber, eventually becoming a director and guiding the careers of W. H. Auden, Steven Spender, and Ted Hughes.  He wrote seven plays, several collections of well-regarded essays, and a book of light verse entitle Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which became the basis of the Cats musical adaptation by Andrew Lloyd Weber. He regarded The Four Quartets as his finest work, and it led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.