T. S. Eliot, born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis (Missouri), died on January 4, 1965, in London. He studied philosophy and philology at Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. Since 1913, he worked in London as an editor and publisher. In addition to his plays, Eliot became famous for his poetry and essays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 and the Hansischer Goethe-Preis in 1954. Whether as the poet of the groundbreaking long poem "The Waste Land" or as the author of the equally famous cat poems, T. S. Eliot's poetry has remained a source of both irritation and inspiration, far beyond his own time. Contemporary poets, not just English ones, live and work with Eliot's verses, as happens only with great works across generational and linguistic boundaries.