14 Facts About Stith Thompson

Stith Thompson was an American folklorist: he has been described as "America's most important folklorist".

Stith Thompson was born in Bloomfield, Nelson County, Kentucky, on March 7,1885, the son of John Warden and Eliza.

Stith Thompson earned his master's degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1912, where his dissertation was titled "The Idea of the Soul in Teutonic Popular Tales and Ballads".

Stith Thompson studied at Harvard University from 1912 to 1914 under George Lyman Kittredge, writing the dissertation "European Borrowings and Parallels in North American Indian Tales," and earning his Ph.

Stith Thompson was an English instructor at the University of Texas, Austin from 1914 to 1918, teaching composition.

In 1921, Stith Thompson was appointed associate professor at the English Department of the Indiana University Bloomington, which had the responsibility of overseeing its composition program.

Stith Thompson organized an informal quadrennial summertime "Institute of Folklore" beginning in 1942 which lasted beyond his retirement from tenure in 1955.

Stith Thompson had developed an understanding of these new techniques through travel and research and published an expanded translation of Aarne's The Types of the Folktale in 1928, creating a catalogue of folktale types, that included tales from Europe and Asia.

Stith Thompson used this classification in his Tales of the North American Indians published in 1929.

For nearly twenty years after his retirement, Stith Thompson continued to work on his Motif-Index and The Types of the Folktale - he published revised editions of the volumes of the Motif-Index between 1955 and 1958.

Stith Thompson even produced an anthology at the age of 83, One Hundred Favorite Folktales.

In 1976, Stith Thompson died of heart failure at his home in Columbus, Indiana.

Stith Thompson served as President of the American Folklore Society between 1937 and 1939 and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1947.

Stith Thompson received a number of Honorary Degrees from universities including University of North Carolina, Indiana Central College and University of Kentucky.