Eliot, the poet and literary critic, won a scholarship to attend Merton in 1914 but dropped out after just one year.
He moved to London and was hired by Lloyd's. In 1922 he published his most famous poem, Waste Land, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
Merton's alumni include three other Nobel Prize winners: Frederick Soddy (Chemistry, 1921), Nikolaas Tinbergen (Medicine, 1973), and Anthony Leggett (Physics, 2003)