Virgil Thomson is America's greatest composer and critic who changed the face of music by developing the 'American Sound'. Following on the critically acclaimed 2014 edition of Thomson's collected newspaper music criticism, The Library of America and Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page now presents Thomson's major literary and critical works, a body of writing that constitutes America's musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson's name as a critic.