Things You Might Not Know About T.S. Eliot

1. HE ENJOYED HOLDING DOWN "REAL" JOBS.

Throughout his life, Eliot supported himself by working as a teacher, banker, and editor. He could only write poetry in his spare time, but he preferred it that way.

2. He tried to suppress reprints and biographies.

He worked his will to expressly prevent anyone from writing his biography, and instructed his literary executors to keep most of his unpublished verse under wraps and refuse permission to reprint his works under most circumstance. 

3. He didn’t just write poetry

• While Eliot’s most renowned work is certainly his poetry, he also wrote in a number of other genres. Most notably, he attempted to revive the bygone art of the verse drama, composing The Rock (1934) and The Cocktail Party(1949). 
• Though Eliot would prove unable to successfully jumpstart a renewed era for the antiquated form dating back to the Ancient Greeks, he would prove to have an outsize impact on the world of musical theater. 
• His book of feline-centric poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), originally composed for his god children, would become the basis of Cats (1980), one of the longest running musicals in Broadway history.

4.ONE OF THE LONGEST-RUNNING BROADWAY SHOWS EVER EXISTS THANKS TO HIM.

One doesn’t want to lose one’s skill,” he explained in his Paris Review interview. A fan of Eliot's Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats since childhood, in the late '70s, Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to set many of Eliot's poems to music. The result: the massively successful stage production "Cats," which opened in London in 1981 and, after its 1982 NYC debut, became one of the longest-running Broadway shows of all time.

5. He’s memorialized near Geoffrey Chaucer

By the end of his life, Eliot was living in circumstances much changed from those of his early days as a writer. Where, decades previously, he had been in a disastrous marriage and Ezra Pound was trying to raise money for him, in his later years he entered into a much less terrible marriage (albeit to a former secretary of his who was more than 30 years his junior) and once gave a reading in Minnesota that drew just shy of 14,000 people.