T.S. Eliot

(1888 - 1965)

In one of the Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot alludes to, among other writers and sources, his sixteenth-century ancestor Thomas Elyot, Heraclitus, and the Book of Ecclesiastes. In 1917 Eliot took a job at Lloyds Bank in London—“It is a peaceful, but very interesting pursuit, and involves some use of reasoning powers”—and remained there until 1925. During that time he published Prufrock and Other Observations and The Waste Land. Eliot later took an editorial job at Faber & Faber, where he declined to publish George Orwell’s Animal Farm.