Michael Thomas

“A prize-winning writer’s anguish . . . Thomas believes that one way to keep ‘from falling into darkness’ is to try ‘to make something beautiful.’ The Broken King hits the mark . . . A powerful memoir of childhood trauma, literary success, and mental illness.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“There’s a bridge of beautiful American prose—lyrical, powerful, fearlessly candid—running straight from James Baldwin to Thomas, who is obviously Baldwin’s worthy heir.” —Francisco Goldman, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey Boy

“A writer of enthralling voice and startling insight.” — IMPAC Dublin Judges Citation

“Absorbing . . . Intimate . . . Grappling with his own addictions, mental illness, and past trauma, all while aspiring to be a wholly present husband, father, brother, and son, Thomas details his life from growing up in the Boston suburbs through his young fatherhood and finding his path as a Black man in America. Thomas is a captivating writer, infusing his passages with turns of phrase and language that are at once powerful and delicate, always encompassing the complexity of Black fatherhood and elegantly dissecting the consequences of societal pressure. For fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates.”—Allison Escoto, Booklist (starred review)

“By turns raw and lyrical, captivating and vexing, The Broken King is vivid testament to the damage wrought by personal and generational trauma—and to the power of art to lay bare what cannot otherwise be said.”
—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House

“The Broken King is a book for now, but feels like it’s always been part of the world in the way only great literature does. This hardscrabble lyric masterpiece is funny and brutal, soaring and chthonic. A triumph, and reading it will leave you changed. It’s genuinely one of the most extraordinary and magical books I have ever read. I’m full of awe.”—Helen Macdonald, New York Times bestselling author of H Is for Hawk

Michael Thomas is the author of The Broken King (Grove/Atlantic, 2025), a memoir about four generations of men in his family which traces the lives of these men against the backdrop of the last century-and-a-half in American history. The title is borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s line in “Little Gidding”: “If you came at night like a broken king,” and the work ponders the process of being broken. Akin to Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time or Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Thomas’ memoir unfolds through six powerful, interlocking, and overlaying sections focusing on the lives of five men: his father—a philosopher, Boston Red Sox fan, and absent parent; his estranged older brother; his two sons growing up in Brooklyn; and—always and heartbreakingly—himself. At the center of The Broken King is the story of Thomas’ own breakdown, a result of inherited family history and his own experiences, from growing up Black in the Boston suburbs to publishing a prize-winning novel with “the house of Beckett.” Every page of The Broken King rings with the impact of America’s sweeping struggle with race and class, education and family, and builds to a brave, meticulous articulation of a creative mind’s journey into and out of madness.

His debut novel, Man Gone Down (Grove/Atlantic, 2007), is a beautifully written, insightful, and devastating book that follows a young, Black father in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth. On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed Black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend’s six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep the kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for his family. Donna Seaman wrote, “Thomas has written a rhapsodic and piercing post-9/11 lament over aggression, greed, and racism, and a ravishing blues for the soul’s unending loneliness.” Man Gone Down was selected as one of the New York Times Book Review’s top five novels of the year, a New York Times Top Ten Novel of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, and a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book.

In June 2009, Thomas was awarded the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which the New York Times cited as “the largest and most international literary prize in the world after the Nobel.” Man Gone Down was selected for this award from 145 nominations around the globe, four of which were from the US. According to the judges, Man Gone Down is: “brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth.” The judges continue: “Thomas’ novel shows, in unsentimental clarity, the way the future can close mercilessly on those marginalized by race and social circumstance. ‘Not a train,’ as he writes about the cadences of the blues, ‘but something coming down the track under its own unconscious locomotion.’”

Thomas received his BA from Hunter College and his MFA from Warren Wilson College. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The New York Times, and in Ben George’s anthology The Book of Dads. Currently, he is a full-time professor of English at Hunter College. An eloquent and charismatic speaker, Thomas easily addresses a wide variety of topics.

Born and raised in Boston, he currently lives in Brooklyn.

Short Bio

Michael Thomas is the author of The Broken King, a memoir about four generations of men in his family, and the novel Man Gone Down, winner of the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and a New York Times Top Ten Novel of the Year. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, The New York Times, and in Ben George’s anthology The Book of Dads. Thomas received his BA from Hunter College and his MFA from Warren Wilson College. He is a professor of English at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.

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The Broken King

Memoir, 2025

“A radically vulnerable story about men—Black men—fathers and sons, brothers and keepers. We know how these stories end—and yet here, in these pages, these passed-down wounds are transformed into brilliance, beauty, a map of survival.” —Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television

“A beautiful work overflowing with love.” —Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club

“Lord knows, Michael Thomas has paid some dues. He writes on the perils of being Black in America; the sorrows of damaged family; struggles with a self-destructive and treacherous self; of love, work, and ambition; of a mixed-race marriage and of fatherhood with its wondrous mysteries, terrors, joys. There’s a bridge of beautiful American prose—lyrical, powerful, fearlessly candid—running straight from James Baldwin to Thomas, who is obviously Baldwin’s worthy heir. But The Broken King also harkens back to Melville, Emerson, and spans our own time too, as if in transatlantic conversation with Knausgaard. Like all those titans, Thomas writes about the struggle to be a man, and, simply and most complexly, on how to live. An utterly immersive book.”—Francisco Goldman, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey Boy

“Michael Thomas has written a truly extraordinary memoir, one that sears and sings with such terrible, beautiful honesty it will burn its way deep into your bones. This hardscrabble lyric masterpiece is funny and brutal, soaring and chthonic.”—Helen Macdonald, New York Times bestselling author of H Is for Hawk

“[An] entirely mesmerizing memoir ….. with a virtuosic command of language and an eagle eye for punishing detail, Thomas has rendered beautifully an excruciating existence from which it is impossible to turn away…. And yet, it would be misleading to end with the impression that The Broken King is not a hopeful story. Its very existence, the fact that its harrowing events were witnessed and recorded, amounts to an extraordinary display of human will and resilience.” —Thomas Chatterton Williams, New York Times Book Review

In 2007, Michael Thomas launched into the literary world with his award-winning first novel Man Gone Down, a beautiful and devastating story of a Black father trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. Called “powerful and moving . . . an impressive success,” by Kaiama L. Glover on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Thomas’ debut introduced a writer of prodigious and rare talent. In his long-awaited encore and first work of nonfiction, The Broken King, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and the beloved, trauma and recovery, success and failure in a unique, urgent, and timeless memoir.

The title is borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s line in “Little Gidding”: “If you came at night like a broken king,” and the work ponders the process of being broken. Akin to Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time or Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Thomas’ memoir unfolds through six powerful, interlocking and overlaying sections focusing on the lives of five men: his father—a philosopher, Boston Red Sox fan, and absent parent; his estranged, lawless older brother; his two sons growing up in Brooklyn; and ultimately, heartbreakingly himself. At the center of The Broken King is the story of Thomas’ own breakdown, a result of inherited family history and his own experiences, from growing up Black in the Boston suburbs to publishing a prize-winning novel with “the house of Beckett.”

Every page of The Broken King rings with the impact of America’s sweeping struggle with race and class, education and family, and builds to a brave, meticulous articulation of a creative mind’s journey into and out of madness.

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Man Gone Down

Novel, 2007

“A writer of enthralling voice and startling insight.” —IMPAC Dublin Judges Citation

“Powerful and moving . . . An impressive success . . . Thomas seems to have fully embraced the ‘write what you know’ ethos. And what he knows is how the odds are stacked in America. He knows the unlikelihood of successful black fatherhood. He knows that things are set up to keep the Other poor and the poor in their place. More than anything else, he knows how little but also–fortunately–how much it can take to bring a man down.”—Kaiama L. Glover, The New York Times Book Review

“Ambitious . . . The book is filled with some virtuoso passages that expose the subtle degrees of racism in the narrator’s world.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A ravishing blues for the soul’s unending loneliness.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“Thomas’s blues-dirge-y storytelling instincts keep the narrative thrumming.” —People

“Michael Thomas is brilliant. Every page vibrates with love and anger and hope.” —Elizabeth Gaffney

On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend’s six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep the kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them in which to live. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we learn of a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it’s like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.

Read What’s in Print

• Profile of Thomas and The Broken King — The Boston Globe

• Review of The Broken King — The New York Times

• To Be Young, Gifted, and Black at Fenway — The New Yorker

• An Existentialist Enigma: A Profile of the Novelist Michael Thomas — Science Survey

• Review of Man Gone Down — Judges Citation IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

• Op-Ed: I Was Not Michael Jackson — The New York Times

• Review of Man Gone Down — The Guardian

• Michael Thomas wins IMPAC Dublin Prize — The New York Times

• Interview with Michael Thomas — The Boston Globe

• Review of Man Gone Down — The New York Times Book Review

• Review of Man Gone Down — O Magazine

Listen to Audio

• Interview with Tom Ashbrook — NPR

MAN GONE DOWN (excerpt from novel)

I think I would like to leave this world with a song and a tear—that I would’ve held just enough in reserve to still have one of each, that there will be someone there to listen and watch and they in turn will whisper their secret affections—but there’s no way to be noble anymore. Perhaps there never was. “I will be true to the girl who loves me . . .” There are echoes of ditties unsung, therefore promises unmade. The green tree. The yew tree. The grassy hills of England. The tarmac of Brooklyn. A concession of love, a casualty of failure, disappearing down the maw of a vacant avenue, reft of language, left with memory. A phantom who leaves no legacy, only haunting, marring who you loved and who once loved you, chilling those you are near. I shudder on the avenue. What if nothing lies beneath my spasm, my stomach’s descent? What if there are no ghosts in Brooklyn, and my love’s cheeks are unspeakable and all gone?

When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned know of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

The big broken clock hiccups the hour. There’s really no choice in the matter.
I will run.

—from chapter 4

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Acclaimed Novelist & Memoirist
Winner of IMPAC Dublin Award

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