Thomas Larson

Journalist, book/music critic, and memoirist Thomas Larson is the author of Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry, April, 2019, from Swallow Press. He has also written The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease (Hudson Whitman), The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ (Pegasus Press), and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (Swallow Press). He is a twenty-year staff writer for the San Diego Reader, a six-year book review editor for River Teeth, and a former music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican. As a lecturer, Larson has spoken about his book on heart disease, held workshops on “Writing the Memoir” and “The Spiritual Memoir,” and given talks on jazz, American composers, and nonfiction narrative. He continues to work privately with authors on their nonfiction manuscripts.

Author of

The Self, As Ensemble, The Prose, Like Jazz—On Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place

Explicit By

Thomas Larson

| 27 May 2022 Features Books, Essays, Explicit, Reviews African-American literature, Albert Murray, Society (Multitudes), blues, civil rights, culture, identity, intellectual history, jazz, memoir, modernism, race, white supremacy

A paean to Albert Murray and his hybrid memoir/literary criticism masterpiece of 1971, South to a Very Old Place.