Q 01/05

T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in which American city?

A) Boston, Massachusetts

B) St. Louis, Missouri

C) New York City

D) Cambridge, Massachusetts

Answer · why

B) St. Louis, Missouri

His grandfather had gone west to found a Unitarian church there; Eliot said Missouri and the Mississippi left a deeper mark on him than anywhere else.

Q 02/05

What do the initials T. S. stand for?

A) Thomas Stearns

B) Thomas Samuel

C) Theodore Stephen

D) Timothy Sherwood

Answer · why

A) Thomas Stearns

He was named after his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns, and known to friends as Tom.

Q 03/05

Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature in which year?

A) 1953

B) 1957

C) 1962

D) 1948

Answer · why

D) 1948

The citation praised his 'outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry'.

Q 04/05

Eliot became a British subject in 1927 at what age?

A) 42

B) 39

C) 45

D) 50

Answer · why

B) 39

He renounced his American citizenship in the same year he converted to Anglicanism.

Q 05/05

At which university did Eliot take his BA and MA before studying philosophy in Paris?

A) Yale

B) Princeton

C) Columbia

D) Harvard

Answer · why

D) Harvard

He later went back to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, and wrote a doctoral thesis on F. H. Bradley that he never returned to defend.