Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America on 26th September 1888. His paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote poetry, was a social worker which, at that time, was a new profession in the USA. Eliot was the last of six surviving children. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the named after his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns.
From 1898 to 1905, Tom attended Smith Academy, the boys college preparatory division of Washington University, where his studies included Ancient Greek, Latin, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was 14, under the influence of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
After graduating from Smith Academy, Tom attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer, who later published “The Waste Land”. Tom studied at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning a Bachelor of Arts in an elective programme similar to comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts in English literature the following year. Due to his year at Milton Academy, Eliot was allowed to earn his Bachelor of Arts (BA) after three years instead of the usual four.
Tom worked as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, before moving to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the University of Paris. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Alain-Fournier – author of the book “ Le Grand Meaulnes”. In 1911 Tom returned to Harvard to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. While he was a member of the Harvard Graduate School, Tom fell in love with Emily Hale. Tom was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford University, UK in 1914. He first visited Marburg in the German Empire, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the First World War broke out he went to the University of Oxford instead.
