Henri Thomas was born at Anglemont, Vosges, and grew up in the Alsace/Lorraine region of France. He moved to Paris to attend the prestigious Henri IV high school, working with the noted essayist Alain. However, his teaching and academic career faltered and he dedicated himself to writing full-time from 1935. He mixed with many influential intellectuals and writers in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s, most notably Gide and Paulhan. His first novel "The Coal Bucket" was published by Gallimard in 1940, as were the majority of his literary productions (novels, short stories, journals, poems, essays, etc.) for the next forty-odd years. In the 1940s he did his military service, got married, worked on a number of literary reviews and separated from his wife.
In 1945, Thomas took a job with the BBC in London and lived and worked there for about ten years. Also during this period, he met the woman who would later become his second wife and their daughter was born while the couple were in London.
In 1958, he was hired as a professor at Brandeis University in the United States, where he lived and worked for two years.
After his return to France in 1960 he worked as a literary editor and translator at Gallimard and spent his time primarily in Paris and in Brittany, although after his second wife died in 1965, Thomas began to live mostly in Brittany. He moved to a rest home in Paris in 1991 after his health failed and died there in 1993.
