Thomas Stearns Eliot (who preferred to use his initials, T.S.) was the youngest of seven children and grandson of the founder of Washington University in St. Louis, MO. His schooling took him to the great centers of this country, Paris, and London. At the beginning of World War I, he taught at a boys school near London. He failed the physical examination for service in the navy. After the war, he continue to make England his home, becoming a British subject in 1927. Eliot was editor of The Egoist, a British literary magazine, and in 1922 he founded The Criterion, a quarterly review. He won the American Medal of Freedom in 1946 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.