Stith Thompson
| Stith Thompson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 7, 1885 Bloomfield, Kentucky, United States |
| Died | January 10, 1976 (aged 90) Columbus, Indiana, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for |
|
Stith Thompson (March 7, 1885 – January 10, 1976) was an American scholar of folklore. He is the "Thompson" of the Aarne–Thompson classification system, which indexes certain folktales by their structure and assigns them AT numbers. He also developed an alpha-decimal motif-index system (A~Z followed by numeral) for cataloging individual motifs.
Stith Thompson, born in Bloomfield, Nelson County, Kentucky, on March 7, 1885 as the son of John Warden and Eliza (McClaskey) Thompson moved with his family to Indianapolis at the age of twelve. He attended Butler University and obtained his BA degree from University of Wisconsin.
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.
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 may derive from contact with an analogous Scandinavian tale.
Thompson was English instructor at the University of Texas, Austin from 1914 to 1918, teaching composition. In 1921, he was appointed associate professor at the English Department of the Indiana University (Bloomington), which also had the responsibility of overseeing its composition program.
...
Wikipedia