Stith Thompson

• Name — Stith Thompson • Born — 7 March 1885 • Birthplace — Bloomfield, Kentucky, US • Died — 10 January 1976 • Place of death — Columbus, Indiana, US • Fields — * Folkloristics • English literature • Workplaces — * University of Texas • Indiana University Bloomington • Education — * University of Wisconsin • University of California, Berkeley • Harvard University • Known for — * Aarne–Thompson classification system • Motif-index of folk-literature

Stith Thompson was born in Bloomfield, Nelson County, Kentucky, on March 7, 1885, the son of John Warden and Eliza (McClaskey). Thompson moved with his family to Indianapolis at the age of twelve and attended Butler University from 1903 to 1905 before he obtained his BA degree from University of Wisconsin in 1909 (his undergraduate thesis was titled, 'The Return from the Dead in Popular Tales and Ballads'). For the next two years he taught at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, during which time he learned Norwegian from lumberjacks. He 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".

He 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.D. (The revised thesis was later published in 1919). This grew out of Kittredge's assignment, whose theme was investigating a certain tale called "The Blue Band", collected from the Chipewyan tribe in Saskatchewan, which may derive from contact with an analogous Scandinavian tale.

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

In 1921, Thompson was appointed associate professor at the English Department of the Indiana University Bloomington, which also had the responsibility of overseeing its composition program. Within a year he began offering courses in folklore: these were among the first courses in the field taught in the United States. His commitment to the promotion of academic research in folklore resulted in the creation of the PhD program in folklore at Indiana in 1949 - the first of its kind in the United States. The first doctorate was awarded (to Warren E. Roberts) in 1953. For this - along with the establishment of folklore courses elsewhere in US academia by his former students - Thompson has been claimed to have been "largely responsible for establishing folklore on a firm academic footing in the United States". He organized an informal quadrennial summertime "Institute of Folklore" beginning in 1942 which lasted beyond his retirement from tenure in 1955. This brought together scholars with an interest in the field of folklore and helped to bring structure to the growing discipline. In 1962, a permanent Institute of Folklore was established at Bloomington, with Richard Dorson serving as its administrator and chief editor of its journal publication.

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

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. He received a number of Honorary Degrees from universities including University of North Carolina (1946), Indiana Central College (1953) and University of Kentucky (1958).

Thompson's 1954 article for The Filson Club History Quarterly entitled "The Beauchamp Family" continues in use by genealogists As of 2011. In this article Thompson states that he is descended from a Costin Beauchamp (born 1738) from Somerset County, Maryland which extends back to John Beauchamp one of the members of the Plymouth Company.