Howard Thompson (October 25, 1919 – March 10, 2002) was an American journalist and film critic whose career of forty-one years was spent at The New York Times. Henry Howard Thompson Jr. was born in Natchez, the seat of Mississippi's Adams County. He began his college studies at Louisiana State University, but left to serve as a paratrooper in the United States Army during World War II. During this period, Thompson was captured and spent six months in a German prisoner of war camp. After demobilisation, he continued his studies at Columbia University. In 1947, he joined The New York Times as an office boy in the personnel department, and soon moved to the movie section as a clerk to Bosley Crowther, the film critic at the Times. He later advanced to a reporter who frequently interviewed fil