As one of America's first modernist poets, T. S. Eliot's unique style and subject matter would have a dramatic influence on writers for the century to come. Born in 1888 in St. Louis Mo. at the tail end of the "Cowboy era" he grew up in the more civilized industrial era of the early 20th century, a time of the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford. The Eliot family was endowed with some of the best intellectual and political connections in America of that time, and as a result went to only the best schools. By 1906 he was a freshman in Harvard, finishing his bachelors in only 3 years and studying philosophy in France from 1910 to 1914, the outbreak of war. In 19