Thompson was an English instructor at the University of Texas, Austin from 1914 to 1918, teaching composition. In 1921, he was appointed associate professor at the English Department of the Indiana University (Bloomington), which also had the responsibility of overseeing its composition program. He collected and archived traditional ballads, tales, proverbs, aphorisms, riddles, etc. The parallels and worldwide distributions of these could be studied using his motif cataloguing apparatus leading him to publish the first volume of his "Motif-Index" which was printed in 1955.