ABSTRACT
Thomson had two short essays that he often released in slight different forms. One, reprinted here as “Personal Statement,” dealt deliciously with ironies in his own life. The second, reprinted in the next section, introduced his single most admired work, Four Saints in Three Acts. “The Music Reviewer and His Assignment” began as a talk to a dinner meeting at the National Institute of Arts and Letters on 17 November 1953. To this audience, Thomson, then 57 and on the verge of retiring from The Paper, felt less constrained. One quality of his memoir of New York culture during the war is his acknowledgment of the role of immigration in introducing not one art but several.
