There are many Americas. Which were Eliot's? Born into a family whose ancestors came to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century and whose members had more recently settled in a distant region, T. S. Eliot combined a New England cultural memory with midwestern experience. Although his grandparents reached Missouri in the 1830s, the family carefully maintained its New England connection. Indeed, after the patriarch, Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot, died in 1887, the poet's family began to gravitate back to Massachusetts. In the 1890s Eliot's father purchased a house on Cape Ann where his family could retreat from sweltering St. Louis summers. Soon after her husband died, Eliot's mother moved to the Boston area, as would all but her youngest child. A century after his grandparents arrived, none of Eliot's immediate family remained in St. Louis.

Partly southern and partly midwestern, located in the center of a vast continent but poised on a great inland waterway, St. Louis marked Eliot's childhood imagination. During Missouri winters he yearned for the firs, red granite, and blue ocean of coastal New England. Yet as he summered there, limestone bluffs full of fossil shellfish near the “long dark river“ drew his memory back to the Mississippi. Even opening his mouth to speak, drawling like a southerner during boyhood visits to Boston, reminded Eliot of his double origins. In fact, his father was born and bred in St. Louis, and his mother and both paternal grandparents were born or raised south of the Mason-Dixon line. Yet Eliot also knew that his family, for reasons that reach deep into American history and into their past, considered themselves socially superior to the southerners they met in St. Louis.