Robert McG. Thomas, Jr.

Who was Robert McG. Thomas, Jr.?

Robert McGill Thomas, Jr. was an American journalist who worked for many years at The New York Times, and who has become particularly noted for the obituaries he wrote for that newspaper. He wrote under the name Robert McG. Thomas; more than thirty of his obituaries were included in the anthology, The Last Word. Since his death, a larger collection of Thomas' obituaries was published as 52 McGs.: The Best Obituaries from Legendary New York Times Reporter Robert McG. Thomas. The author of a starred Kirkus Review wrote, "For the last half of the 1990s, readers of the New York Times could be excused if they searched out Thomas’s work before they bothered with the front-page lead. Known as “McGs.”—after the veteran reporter’s middle name—these little beauties celebrated the unsung, the queer, the unpretentious, the low-rent."

Michael T. Kaufman, who undertook the daunting task of writing the obituary in the New York Times for the Times' celebrated obituary writer, described Thomas as the person "who extended the possibilities of the conventional obituary form, shaking the dust from one of the most neglected areas of daily journalism."