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The Poets of St Louis
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Thomas Stearns Eliot
, who as a naturalized Englishman won the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in St Louis on September 26, 1888. His family were Unitarian aristocrats who traced their ancestry back to the earliest days of settlement in New England; his grandfather, the Rev William Eliot, founded St Louis' Washington University. Eliot lived in the city until he was seventeen, and went to school at Smith Academy on Union Avenue, a period which he later referred to as one of the happiest of his life. The "Prufrock" of his first major poem,
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
, was a St Louis furniture dealer; "the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes" was the smog drifting across the Mississippi from the city's factories.
Once Eliot had moved to Boston, to attend Harvard University, and then on to Europe, he rarely returned, and he deliberately threw off his drawling St Louis accent. The house in which he was born, at 2635 Locust St, has long since been torn down, and the only memorial to him in the city is the incongruous brass star set into the sidewalk of Delmar Boulevard as part of the St Louis Walk of Fame.
Another honoree of the Walk of Fame,
Chuck Berry
, first saw the light of day on October 18, 1926, at 2520 Goode Ave - echoed in his most famous song,
Johnny B Goode
. Berry played his earliest gigs at the Cosmopolitan Club at 17th and Bond in East St Louis. Initially seen as a bizarre hybrid, a black hillbilly singing country-and-western, within a few months of his first recording for Chess Records in Chicago (
Maybellene
, in 1955) Chuck Berry's blend of razor-sharp lyrics and incisive guitar-playing - not to mention his legendary business acumen - had made him the definitive rock 'n' roll songwriter. Other useful information
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