Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888, and was educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Merton College, Oxford. His family was of English origin, having come to the United States in the 17th century. He settled permanently in England in 1915.
His first published work, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), contained one of his best loved poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” His second book, Poems (1919) was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. The Sacred Wood, a collection of critical essays, appeared in 1920. His most famous works, The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925), were products of his artistic generation’s post-World War I mentality of despair.
Around this time Eliot’s interests began to move toward playwriting. His post-mortem tribute to the actress Marie Lloyd was well received in 1922. In 1927 he published the Sweeney Agonistes fragments, the same year that he became a naturalized British citizen and was welcomed into the Church of England. His plays all dealt with religious and moralistic themes: 1930’s Ash Wednesday and his 1934 pageant play for the London churches; his Murder in the Cathedral (1935), an examination of the martyrdom of St. Thomas a Becket; The Family Reunion (1939), dealing with guilt and redemption in the aristocracy; and The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958), all of which examined serious religious themes in the form of modern social comedy.
Eliot received the Order of Merit in January 1948 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature later that year. He was an Officeur de la Legion d’Honneur, the recipient of the Hanseatic Goethe Prize in 1954, and was awarded the Dante Gold Medal in 1959.
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which provided the book for this musical, was published in 1939. Eliot received the Tony Award for the book of Cats in 1983, 18 years after his death.