Howard Thompson

Henry Howard Thompson Jr. (born October 25, 1919 in Natchez , Mississippi , † March 10, 2002 in Cape Canaveral , Florida ) was an American journalist and film critic .

Life

Henry Howard Thompson Jr. studied journalism at Louisiana State University . During the Second World War he served as a paratrooper in the United States Army , where he was interned in a German POW camp for about 6 months. After the war he studied journalism at Columbia University . Since the journalist Turner Catledge was a second cousin of his, he was given the opportunity to work as an office boy from 1947 and later in the personnel department of the New York Times before he became secretary to the film critic Bosley Crowther . Although he already worked as a full-fledged reporter and wrote articles and conducted interviews independently, Thompson did not begin to write as a film critic until the mid-1960s. Thompson became known relatively quickly for his headlines, which were often ironic one-liners. He was temporarily the chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle .

In 1988, Thompson finally retired after 51 years with the Times. He continued to write his one-liners for the Critic's Choice column . After surviving a stroke in 1996 , he moved to Florida in 1997, where he died on March 10, 2002 at the age of 82 of complications from pneumonia .

Web links

• Howard Thompson on Rotten Tomatoes
• Douglas Martin: Howard Thompson, 82, Writer Of Mini-Reviews for The Times