William Irwin Thompson World Wide Website

Copyright, William Irwin Thompson, 2010.

Thompson became nationally known for his best-selling book, At the Edge of History, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972. He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986 for his science fiction fantasy novel, Islands Out of Time. As a cultural historian, he is most widely known for his book, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture. As a philosopher of science, he is known for his three books, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science, Gaia, A Way of Knowing, and Gaia Two: Emergence, the New Science of Becoming. (See "The Gaian Politics of William Irwin Thompson" in Earth Light Magazine. http://www.earthlight.org/2002/essay47_peters.html) In 1996 he published Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, followed by an expanded paperback edition in 1998, and in 1997 he published Worlds Interpenetrating and Apart: Collected Poems, 1959-1996, followed by A Diary of Sorts and Streets in 2007 and Still Travels: Three Long Poems in 2009. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjWFXlAQssQ.

Thompson was born in Chicago in 1938, but moved to Southern California in 1945, where he grew up to graduate from Los Angeles High School in 1957 and Pomona College in 1962. He received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at Cornell in 1962 and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship to do his doctoral research in Dublin in 1964. He received his doctorate from Cornell in 1966 and published his first book, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 in 1967. Thompson has taught at Cornell, MIT, and York University in Toronto. His interdisciplinary interests are indicated in that he studied anthropology, philosophy, and literature at Pomona, and literature and cultural history at Cornell. He has served as visiting professor of religion at Syracuse University (1973), visiting professor of Celtic Studies at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto (1984), visiting professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1985), Rockefeller Scholar at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco (1992-1995), and Lindisfarne Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in the autumn of each year from 1992 to 1996. In 1995 he designed an evolution of consciousness curriculum for the Ross School in East Hampton, New York and serves as a Founding Mentor. Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association in 1972 and served as its Director until 1997. He has now retired from Lindisfarne and teaching and lives in Maine and devotes himself to writing essays and poetry; he often contributes to the Wild River Review. (http://www.wildriverreview.com/) and the Seven Pillars Review.(http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/).