T.S. Eliot

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Thomas Stearns Eliot quickly shed his American roots for the comforting embrace of British Anglicanism, becoming a naturalized British subject in 1927. This conversion wasn't just spiritual; it was a renunciation of, well, a lot of things he found distasteful about modernity, including, apparently, some of its inhabitants.

Eliot's poetry, particularly "The Waste Land," is lauded as a monumental achievement, a complex tapestry of despair and disillusionment. He single-handedly invented the concept of "difficult" poetry and made it fashionable, ensuring generations of English majors would spend sleepless nights over his allusions. His influence on modernism is undeniable, and his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 solidified his place in the literary pantheon.

Despite the literary accolades, Eliot's personal views were, charitably, complicated. He cultivated an image of the stoic, cerebral intellectual, but his writings occasionally betrayed an undercurrent of something less charitable towards certain demographics. He famously described himself as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion," which, for some, translated to "not a fan of jolly good times or, indeed, various minority groups." Suffice it to say, he was not known for his wild inclusivity.

So, while his poetic genius is undeniable, and he undoubtedly made significant contributions to the world of letters, the kvell-factor here is tempered by the lingering suspicion that he wouldn't have been thrilled to find himself on a list celebrating Jewish achievement. We can still appreciate the art, even if the artist might have preferred we didn't.