T.S. Eliot (26 September, 1888 – 4 January, 1965) was a Noble Award winner American poet and playwright. His famous poem, The Waste Land, went on to redefine a genre.
Sir Thomas Elyot, a 16th century writer, statesman and ancestor of T.S. Eliot is credit with the first recorded use of the words “education” and “democracy”.
T.S. Eliot was a practical joker. The author would put whoopee cushions on seats of visiting authors to the publisher’s house he worked in and give them exploding cigars.
He once broke a board meeting at Faber and Faber by setting off a bucket of firecrackers between the chairman’s legs. It was on the 4th of July!
When giving a lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1956, the audience was so larger it had to be moved to the basketball stadium. Around 14,000 people came.
T.S. Eliot loved Groucho Marx and even wrote him a fan letter and kept his picture on the wall. The two met for a disastrous dinner – Marx wanted to talk poetry, Eliot wanted to talk movies.
The 1910 poem The Triumph of Bullshit (read it now), was the first use of the word “bullshit”.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.”
A father, husband, avid reader, blogger, software engineer & wood worker who is known the world over as a man of many interests and to his wife as “an idiot”.