Stith Thompson

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Stith Thompson (March 7, 1885 – 1976) was an American scholar of folklore and the "Thompson" of the Aarne-Thompson classification system. He was born in Bloomfield, Kentucky, the son of John Warden and Eliza (McCluskey) Thompson.

He joined the English faculty of Indiana University (Bloomington), teaching composition. Interested in traditional ballads and tales, he organized summer institutes on the subject at the university that ran from the 1940s to the 1960s. These led, in 1962, to the foundation of the University's still active Folklore Institute with another preeminent student of folklorist, Richard Dorson.

While Thompson was the author, coauthor, or translator of numerous books and articles on folklore, he was perhaps best known for his work on the classification of motifs in folk tales. His six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1932–37) is considered the international key to traditional material.

Much of author Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String was inspired by his folklore indexes.^{[citation needed]}