His mother's family, "a mixture of crypto Jewish (Isaacs) and Irish stock (Fielding)", was "staunchly Catholic and claimed to be white".
After graduation, he served for two years as an officer in the United States Air Force, principally in Japan, but returned to Jamaica in 1953, married a Jamaican, Doreen Lyons, in 1954, and thereafter lived in Kingston with his wife and children, save for a brief period in the 1970s.
Thompson's last major post was as CEO of Seprod Ltd, a large Jamaican manufacturing firm supplying household products and consumer goods for the local market.
[5] It won the Jamaican National Literary Prize in manuscript in 2001, and was also warmly praised by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jamaican-American poet Louis Simpson:View from Mount Diablo is a remarkable achievement.
In the liner notes, the Jamaican poet Edward Baugh, Professor Emeritus of Caribbean Literature at the University of the West Indies, Mona, wrote:Rippling through these poems, nuancing their meaning, is an alertness to class and color distinctions, which grounds the poems in Jamaican social reality and no doubt in the poet's own place in that reality.
In the sharply, wittily satirical "Pride and Prejudice", the central factor of color consciousness and discrimination operates across cultural boundaries.