The Collected Prose, Volume 4: 1951-1966 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780374617035)

T. S. Eliot, a poet, critic, and publisher, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He settled in England in 1915, where for a few years he worked in the foreign section of Lloyds Bank. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. In 1922, he became editor of the literary journal The Criterion, publishing The Waste Land in its first outing. In 1925 Eliot was recruited by Geoffrey Faber to be the literary editor and a director of a new publishing house, Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). It was a role in which he excelled, going on to establish Faber as a leading publisher of poetry with a list that embraced the outstanding English-language poets of the twentieth century. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He continued to work at Faber until his death in 1965.

A graduate of the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, Archie Burnett is best known for his scholarly editions of the poems and letters of A. E. Housman and the poems of Philip Larkin. He has been a codirector and director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University and currently serves as a professor in the Department of English.