Virgil Thomson was born November 25, 1896 in Kansas City, Missouri. After attending Central High School and a local junior college, Thomson joined the Army and was trained in radio telephony at Columbia University in New York City and in aviation in Texas. World War I ended before he could ship overseas, however.

After the war, Thomson enrolled in Harvard University, studying musical composition under Edward Burlingame Hill and working as an assistant to Archibald Davison. They helped him secure a fellowship to study organ and counterpoint in Paris in 1921. He graduated from Harvard in 1923.

Over the next few years Thomson served as organist for King's Chapel in Boston and contributed pieces of musical journalism to such magazines and publications as Vanity Fair and American Mercury. In 1925 Thomson moved to Paris, France, and remained there until 1940. At that time he moved back to New York City, settling into the Chelsea Hotel and taking on the role of chief music critic at the New York Herald Tribune until 1951.

Thomson wrote two operas with Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947), as well as the opera Lord Byron (1972) by himself. Throughout the 1930s and later he composed ballet scores, incidental music for the theater, and musical portraits, amongst other pieces. In 1948 he composed the score for the film Louisiana Story, which won a Pulitzer Prize that year.

After resigning from the Tribune, Thomson wrote an autobiography, as well as essays that appeared together in American Music Since 1910, amongst other publications.

Thomson won numerous awards and other recognition, including 16 honorary doctorates, membership in the French Legion of Honor and in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Virgil Thomson died on September 30, 1989 at his home in New York City.