His late father, Walter Wright Thompson, an attorney, played a pivotal role in Clarksdale's emergence as a tourist destination based on blues music.
He later moved to the Kansas City Star, where he covered a wide variety of sports events including Super Bowls, Final Fours, The Masters, and The Kentucky Derby.
In 2024, Penguin Press published The Barn, Thompson's account of the 1955 abduction, torture, and lynching of the fourteen-year-old Black boy Emmett Till by white men near Drew, Mississippi.
[5][6][7] Jennifer O'Connell wrote: In the piece, McGregor’s childhood upbringing in the “projects” of Crumlin and Drimnagh suggests he was brought up in the Gaza Strip or 1920s Chicago, not a neighbourhood in which this writer lived for six happy and peaceful years, oblivious to the grenades whizzing by, or the fact that I should have been taking an armed escort whenever I had to cross the Liffey.
This is lazy stereotyping bullshit of the highest order ...Pappyland (2020 - Book: A Story Of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last)