Virgil Thomson was born in 1896 in Kansas City, Missouri to an old Baptist farming family. He always retained a love for the land, but its traditions did not have the usual effect upon him: he attributed to his seemingly gentle mid-Southern heritage his “arrogance and unhesitating disobedience”. He liked to cite religion as an example: “I have never felt inferior to the believers, or superior; I simply am not one... The loyalties formed in my preadolescent years lie elsewhere than to Bible reading and preachers. They are to music, companionship, and hospitality...”

After military service came Harvard. A tour of Europe with the Harvard Glee Club in 1921 altered his life permanently. He fell in love with Paris, that den of intellectual ferment packed with native and expatriate artists, poets, musicians, and wealthy hangers-on. Thomson spent most of two decades there, carefully avoiding “working” to s