Stith thompson biography of barack

American folklorist (–)

Stith Thompson (March 7, – January 10, )^[1] was an American folklorist: he has been described as "America's most important folklorist".^[2]

He is the "Thompson" of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index, which indexes folktales by type, and the author of the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, a resource for folklorists that indexes motifs, granular elements of folklore.

Biography

Early life

Stith Thompson was born in Bloomfield, Nelson County, Kentucky, on March 7, , 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 to before he obtained his BA degree from University of Wisconsin in (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