Student-Loan Deadbeats: Fashionable Theft

He was the greatest poet and critic of his time, but poetry and criticism do not in general pay all that well, and T. S. Eliot, unfortunately for him, lived in an age in which celebrity academics did not bank CEO money. He came from a well-to-do family — his father was a very successful businessman in St. Louis— but his family did little to support him financially. As a young man, Eliot taught French and Latin at both private and government schools, but marriage brought with it additional financial burdens, and in 1917 — two years after publishing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” — he took a job at Lloyd’s bank, on the foreign business desk.