In The Saddest Music Ever Written (Pegasus, $26.95), the first book to explore Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, music and literary critic
(and UNM School of Music alum) Thomas Larson tells the story of the prodigal composer and his seminal masterpiece: from its composition in 1936, when Barber was just twenty-six, to its orchestral premiere two years later, led by the great Arturo Toscanini, and its fascinating history as America's secular hymn for grieving our dead. Older Americans know the Adagio from the funerals and memorials for Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Grace Kelly. Younger Americans recall the work as the antiwar theme of the movie Platoon and its basis for the popular DJ Tiesto remix.  

In 2004, the radio program BBC Today, began a competition to find the saddest music in the world. After receiving more than four hundred nominations, they listed the top five on a website for voting. Barber's Adagio won the voting with more than half the total vote, and doubled the votes of the second place nominee, Henry Purcell's Dido's Lament.  Larson further compares the piece's sadness to such songs as Joni Mitchell's "River" and Tom Waits' "Georgia Lee."

Larson places this iconic work in a biographical context, and traces it through our cultural history and its evolution in our changing media. 

"The Saddest Music Ever Written is about much more than a single piece of music. It is an exploration of a fascinating 20th-century composer, a
case study in the cultural appropriation of works of art, and an often very personal meditation on the power of music."  -Kevin Bazzana, author
of Lost Genius and Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould

Thomas Larson is the author of The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative which evaluates the dramatic rise of the
memoir in the last twenty years and explores the craft and purpose of contemporary memoir writing. For twelve years, Larson has been a
contributing writer for the weekly San Diego Reader where he specializes in investigative journalism, narrative nonfiction, and profiles. He is a
regular book reviewer for Contrary Magazineonline and writes reviews for other magazines and journals as well.  His personal memoir pieces
have appeared in Potomac Review, Chicago Reader, Cimarron Review, Hawaii Review, San Diego Reader, and The Cream City Review, where he won the
Editor's Award for Nonfiction.  Critical essays on memoir and autobiography have appeared in Boulevard, The San Diego Union-Tribune,
AWP Chronicle, El Paso Review, and other periodicals. "Skull and Roses-Reflections on Enshrining Georgia O'Keeffe" came out in Southwest
Review, and a critical re-reading of the recently published, unexpurgated "definitive edition" of Anne Frank's diary appeared in
Antioch Review. Larson teaches classes, leads workshops, and lectures on memoir and the music of Samuel Barber throughout the United States. He
is the father of two sons, Jeremy and Blake. He and his partner, Suzanna Neal, live in San Diego and, every spring, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.