Vance Thompson

Who was Vance Thompson?

Vance Thompson was an American literary critic, novelist and poet. The son of a Pittsburgh pastor, he was educated at Princeton University and graduated in 1883. He later studied in Germany, and worked as a dramatic critic in New York City from 1890 to 1897. Like fellow-aesthete and good friend James Huneker, he helped bring fin-de-siècle French authors to the attention of the American public. Thompson also authored several books on healthy living, such as 1914's Eat and Grow Thin and 1916's Drink and Be Sober. He also wrote a study on the ego entitled the Ego Book: a Book of Selfish Ideals. A study of French authors with ties to the Symbolist movement was published in 1913, entitled French Portraits: Being Appreciations of the Writers of Young France. From 1895 to 1899, he co-edited the periodical M'lle New York with Huneker. Described as "a highly idiosyncratic blend of serious analyses and presentations of European Symbolist literature and thought with buffoonery and incessant anti-philistinism", it quickly became a manifesto for their cultural ideals.