American poet Dustan Thompson was born in Connecticut and educated at Harvard University. After briefly coediting the magazine Vice Versa with classmate and fellow dropout Harry Brown in New York City, Thompson joined the U.S. Army in 1942. During the war, Thompson published his first book, Poems (1942), which received acclaim. His other books include including Laments for the Sleepwalkers (1946), the travel book The Phoenix in the Desert (1951), and the novel The Dove with the Bough of Olive (1954). After the war, Thompson settled in the UK with his partner and died in 1975.

After publishing relatively little in his lifetime, Thompson has received much posthumous attention for balancing his Catholic and homosexual identities. Poet D.A. Powell has called Thompson an “American master” and poet-critic Dana Gioia wrote that Thompson was “one of the first poets—and certainly the best of the World War era—to write openly about homosexual experience.”