- He was born in America, in St Louis, to a prominent family from Boston, but at 25 he moved to Britain, and became a British citizen in 1927. He renounced his American passport and even his religion – he was brought up as a Unitarian but converted to Anglicanism.
- His interest in literature began when he was a child and suffering from a congenital double inguinal hernia. This limited the physical activities he could take part in, and he was isolated from children his own age. So instead, he'd curl up with a book.
- He wasn't a full-time writer. Unlike many aspiring authors, he didn't even aspire to be. He believed that working in ordinary jobs (such as teaching and working for Lloyds Bank) made him a better poet. It took the pressure off – he wasn't dependent on his writing to make a living. Another reason was that he thought that writing for too long reduced the quality of his writing. He imposed a limit on himself – no more than three hours writing a day. He said, “I sometimes found at first that I wanted to go on longer, but when I looked at the stuff the next day, what I’d done after the three hours were up was never satisfactory. It’s much better to stop and think about something else quite different.”
- He once got out of a period of writer's block by writing poetry in French.
- He had a number of famous friends, including James Joyce – he and Joyce disliked each other when they first met - Eliot thought Joyce was arrogant, and Joyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet. However, they later became friends. The opposite was true with Groucho Marx. Eliot was a fan and wrote Marx fan mail. The two corresponded for years, but when they met in person it was a disappointment for both of them. Marx wanted to talk about literature while Eliot wanted to talk about Marx's film, Duck Soup.
- He invented a common swearword. He wrote a poem dissing his critics and called it The Triumph of Bullshit. The Oxford English Dictionary credits the poem with being the first time this word ever appeared in print.
- His first marriage was a disaster. In 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a dancer and socialite. She suffered from a number of physical and mental health problems and the couple drifted apart. Vivienne ended her days in a mental hospital where she'd been committed against her will. Her husband never visited her. He claimed the marriage was so bad it inspired his famous poem, The Waste Land. Eliot later married his secretary, Esmé Valerie Fletcher in secret with only the bride's parents in attendance. He was 68, she was 30. The 1994 film Tom & Viv is about Eliot's first marriage.
- A book of poems written for his godson, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and became the hugely successful musical, Cats.
- He is responsible for many famous quotations, including “April is the cruellest month” (The Waste Land) and “This is the way the world ends; Not with a bang but a whimper” (The Hollow Men).
- Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965. His ashes were taken to East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his ancestors had emigrated to America. He'd written a poem about the place and a quote from it is on a wall plaque there: "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning." A quotation from another of his poems is on his commemorative stone in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. This one is from Little Gidding and reads "the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."
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