Thinkers Timeline

T.S. Eliot was a poet and critic. His full name was Thomas Stearns Eliot. He is seen as one of the most important poets in English of the twentieth century. He was born in 1888 in St Louis, in the United States. He died in 1965 in London. Eliot came from a well-off American family. He studied at Harvard University and then in Europe. As a young man he settled in England, and he later became a British citizen. He spent the rest of his life there. Eliot did not begin as a full-time writer. For years he worked at a bank in London, writing poetry in his spare time. Later he became an editor at a publishing house, where he helped many other writers. His most famous poem is 'The Waste Land', published in 1922. It is a difficult, broken poem about a damaged world after the First World War. It made him famous. Later he wrote 'Four Quartets', a long, calmer poem about time and faith. Eliot also wrote important essays about poetry. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His first marriage was very unhappy and painful for both people. In his later years he found more peace, partly through his religious faith and a happy second marriage.

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English writer, journalist, and essayist. He is one of the most quoted writers of the 20th century. He was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal region of British India. His father worked for the British colonial government. His mother brought him back to England when he was a small child. He grew up in modest circumstances in what he later called the 'lower-upper-middle class'. He won scholarships to good English schools, ending up at Eton, one of the most elite schools in the country. He did not do well there academically. Instead of going to university, in 1922 he sailed to Burma (now Myanmar) and joined the Indian Imperial Police. He served for five years. What he saw changed his life. He watched British officers beat and humiliate Burmese people. He took part in colonial rule himself. He came to hate it. In 1927, he left the police, returned to England, and began writing. For years he was poor. He lived with tramps in London, washed dishes in Paris, picked hops in Kent, and taught in small schools. This experience became the material for his first books, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In 1936, he went to Spain to fight against the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. He was shot in the throat by a sniper. His account of the war, Homage to Catalonia (1938), is one of the great books of 20th-century political writing. He spent the Second World War in London, working for the BBC and writing. His two most famous books came in his last years. Animal Farm (1945) was a satire on the Soviet Union. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was a novel about totalitarian rule. He had tuberculosis throughout these years. He died in London on 21 January 1950, aged 46, soon after finishing Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Christopher Hitchens was a British-American journalist, essayist, and writer. He was one of the most famous public intellectuals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He wrote about politics, literature, religion, and many other subjects. He was known for sharp arguments, beautiful prose, and a willingness to take unpopular positions. He was born in 1949 in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. He came from a middle-class British military family. His father was a navy officer. His mother was Jewish, though he only learned this as an adult. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford from 1967. He was active in left-wing student politics. After university he became a journalist. He wrote for left-wing magazines including the New Statesman. In 1981 he moved to the United States. He wrote a regular column for The Nation, a major American left-wing magazine, for nearly 20 years. He became an American citizen in 2007. He wrote for many other publications including Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Slate. He was prolific. He wrote 17 books and thousands of articles. For most of his career, he was on the political left. He was a friend of writers like Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, his politics shifted. He supported the Iraq war in 2003. Many of his old left-wing friends saw this as betrayal. He defended his position fiercely. In 2007 he published God Is Not Great, an aggressive attack on religion. The book made him one of the New Atheists alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2010. He continued writing about his illness with extraordinary honesty. He died in December 2011, aged 62.