was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He was educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne in Paris and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England in 1915 and taught briefly at two schools before joining Lloyds Bank in the city of London. His first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. The Waste Land, his most famous work, was first published in 1922. In 1925 he left the bank to become a director of the publishing house of Faber. There have been several individual and collected editions of his poetry, as well as volumes of his literary and social criticism; he also wrote a number of verse plays, including Murder in the Cathedral, which was commissioned for the Canterbury Festival of 1935. T.S. Eliot had a great affection for cats, and “Possum” was his alias among his friends. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats appeared in October 1939 and was the basis for CATS. He received many honors and distinctions, among them the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Eliot died in January 1965 and was posthumously awarded the 1983 Tony Award for the book of CATS.