Biography Of T. S. EliotEssay Preview: Biography Of T. S. EliotReport this essayPersonal Information: Family: Born September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, United States; moved to England, 1914, naturalized British subject, 1927; died January 4, 1965, in London, England; buried in Westminster Abbey; son of Henry Ware (president of Hydraulic Press Brick Co.) and Charlotte Chauncey (a teacher, social worker and writer; maiden name Stearns) Eliot; married Vivienne Haigh Haigh-Wood (a dancer), January, 1915 (divorced c. 1930; died, 1947); married (Esme) Valerie Fletcher (his private secretary before their marriage), 1957; children: none. Education: Attended Smith Academy (of Washington University), St. Louis, 1898-1905; Milton Academy, Milton, MA, graduated, 1906; Harvard University, B.A. (philosophy), 1909, M.A. (philosophy), 1910, graduate study, 1911-14 (his doctoral dissertation “Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley,” was accepted in 1916 but never presented for the degree; the dissertation was published in 1964 as Knowledge and Experience in Philosophy of F. H. Bradley); attended University of Paris (Sorbonne), 1910-11; studied in Munich, 1914; read philosophy at Merton, Oxford, 1914-15; also studied under Edward Kennard Rand, Irving Babbitt, and Alain Fournier, and attended courses given by Henri Bergson. Politics: Conservative (“royalist”). Religion: Church of England (Anglo-Catholic wing; confirmed, 1927; served as vestryman in a London church). (In his 1028 essay “For Lancelot Andrewes,” Eliot called himself a “classicist,” “royalist,” and “Anglican.” Later, in After Strange Gods, he regretted that declaration as “injudicious.”) Military/Wartime Service: None; was rejected by the U.S. Navy, 1918, because of poor health. Memberships: Classical Association (president, 1941), Virgil Society (president, 1943), Books Across the Sea (president, 1943-46), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (honorary member), Accademia dei Lincei (Rome; foreign member), Bayerische Akademie der Schoenen Kuenste (Munich; foreign member), Athenaeum, Garrick Club, Oxford and Cambridge Club.
Career: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, assistant in philosophy department, 1913-14; teacher of French, Latin, mathematics, drawing, geography, and history at High Wycombe Grammar School, London, then at Highgate School, London, 1915-17; Lloyds Bank Ltd., London, clerk in the Colonial and Foreign Department, 1917-25; The Egoist, London, assistant editor, 1917-19; founder of the Criterion (literary quarterly), London, 1922, and editor, 1922-39 (ceased publication, at Eliots decision, in 1939 because of the war and paper shortage); Faber and Gwyer Ltd. (publishers), later Faber & Faber Ltd., London, literary editor and member of the advisory hoard, 1925-65. Clark Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, six months, 1932-33; Page-Barbour Lecturer at University
, New York (one of four lecturers for one of the first two years of his law firm, and later a professor of English Literature and English Literature at Fordham). Born to a Jewish parent in New Haven, Connecticut, he went to Princeton in 1939 to study French. (See the link to “His Poetogy of Benjamin Franklin” at the top of this page). His studies at Princeton were focused exclusively on Shakespeare’s The Lord of the Rings and the American Civil War, and he also wrote several novels.
Early Life
Baron-of-the-Hill was born in New Haven but moved to New York, where he had first met the late American director Charles Dothan. A boy by the time B.F.W. came to New Haven, he was in fact the only boy in the school’s history to write at a single age. He met Dothan, his partner, at a theater, at the age of two, on the night of a game between two young girls, then on to B.F.W.’s mother and the theater manager, who was apparently upset for her daughter’s attendance at the play. Dothan’s father, the playwright Thomas B. Baron- of Hill, had recently relocated, and the young Baron went through the school system for about two years. In 1942, just after graduating he was appointed to teach and supervise the production of the play at Princeton, but soon became disillusioned with B.F.W.’s work in school. He eventually withdrew from school to join B.F.W.’s production team of actors. By the time B.F.W. was able to come to New Haven to perform in a public performance in 1943 and he began his acting career at a stage in the school’s library near the corner of 10th Street and 6th Street. He was able to move up the school’s reputation quickly. During a performance of the play in “The House in which the Tree is Sown,” he noted that the students “felt the presence in the school’s library,” and he described as “the first time that I have felt that something of the sort came to their attention.” This “theory” of B.F.W.’s work, he said, was not only wrong but “ignorant”—that B.F.W. was acting “in a very young stage”, but that it had little effect on the student’s mind. “There are several things that happened at the scene that I felt compelled to defend (when I performed on an actor for a play that was being played in the library)—but to me, the fact that nothing had changed, was a very sad sign,” he said, “and there is no substitute for watching something in the situation we all face in the theatre.”
During his work in teaching of the character, B.F.W. had no immediate success. It did well in the West Coast, where he also worked as a teacher at other theater or opera houses, but this became a problem in New Haven. In May 1946, B.F.W