"I do not know for certain how much of my own mind he invented."--William Empson
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965. Christopher Ricks is the co-director, with Archie Burnett, of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. His publications on Eliot include T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988), Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 (1996), and Decisions and Revisions in T. S. Eliot (the Panizzi Lectures, 2002), together with True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (2007). Jim McCue is the author of Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents (1997) and the editor of the Penguin Selected Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough (1991). For fifteen years he worked for The Times, where he wrote the Bibliomane column. His imprint, the Foundling Press, began with the first separate publication of T. S. Eliot's Eeldrop and Appleplex and has printed for the first time writings by Alexander Pope, Ben Jonson, Henry James, and A. E. Housman.