Thomas Sancton, Sr.

Thomas Sancton (January 11, 1915 – April 6, 2012) was an American novelist and journalist.^[1][2]

Biography

He was born in the Panama Canal Zone and raised lived most of his life in New Orleans, Louisiana. His two novels, By Starlight and Count Roller Skates, are both set in Louisiana. Mr. Sancton graduated from Tulane University in 1935 and went to work as a reporter at The Times-Picayune. He studied at Harvard as Niemann Fellow in 1941 and 1942.^[3] He wrote extensively on civil rights and the South while managing editor of The New Republic^[4] and, later, as Washington editor of The Nation. In the 1950s he was a reporter and feature writer for The New Orleans Item (afternoon newspaper) and taught feature writing at Tulane University where he had graduated in 1935. In the 1960s he represented clients of Walker Saussy Inc., a New Orleans-based public relations firm, before launching his own public relations business. In earlier years he had reported for Life magazine and the Associated Press. In 2013, his extensive papers and correspondence were placed in the Historic New Orleans Collection.

He is the father of Thomas Sancton, Jr., noted jazz clarinetist, author, and former Paris bureau chief for Time magazine,^[5] and of two daughters, Bethany Villere and Wendy Aucoin. Sancton's wife, Seta Alexander Sancton (1915–2007), was the author "The World From Gillespie Place," a popular memoir of growing up in her native Jackson, Mississippi.

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