Four photographs of T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)

The Waste Land is often read as a meditation on dislocation and disillusionment in the modern world, but Mary Hutchinson, an intimate acquaintance of T.S. Eliot’s, told Virginia Woolf, with whom she was also close, that she thought The Waste Land was also a veiled and “melancholy” version of Eliot’s own life. These snapshots capture Eliot from the age of six through his later years.



In the third photograph, Eliot stands outside the offices of Faber & Gwyer, the publishing house now known as Faber & Faber. Eliot joined the firm as literary editor and director in 1925, three years after the publication of The Waste Land, and remained on staff until his death in 1965, helping to further shape modernist literature by publishing the leading poets of his day.