Thomas Quinn Curtiss

Who was Thomas Quinn Curtiss?

Thomas Quinn Curtiss was a writer, and film and theatre critic.

The son of Roy A. Curtiss and Ethel Quinn, he graduated from the Browning School in New York in 1933. He went on to study film and theatre in Vienna and Moscow, where he was a student of the film director Sergei Eisenstein.

In summer 1937, he met writer Klaus Mann in Budapest and followed him through Europe. Their homosexual relationship lasted for several years, but eventually Tomski left him because of Mann's on-going heroin addiction. Mann's suicidal novel Vergittertes Fenster is dedicated to him.

Curtiss enlisted in the New York 7th Regiment before World War II. He was stationed with Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe in 1944 and later with the US 8th Air Force, where he secured the hidden film library from the Luftwaffe for the Allies. This act gained him the Legion of Honor which was presented by General Charles de Gaulle.

After the war, he became a film and theatre critic for many newspapers and magazines, including New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, and Variety, before he joined the International Herald Tribune for which he continued to write until long after his retirement.