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Thompson was born on Halloween in 1873. He was not born to a world of leisure or play; in fact the opposite. He came of age in steel towns from western Pennsylvania to St. Louis, and the expectation was that he, like his father, would find his calling in the promise of the industrial nation. But even as he served his apprenticeship in factories and internalized that culture's myths and promises, he never fully accepted the terms of Gilded Age industry. The keenest insight he acquired over the course of his apprenticeship, which ranged from steel mills to the gaudy midways of the fin de siècle world's fairs, was that he was not alone in his discontents. Other men shared the desire to have more fun. Instead of censuring or repressing this wish, Thompson ultimately exploited it by applying his industrial patrimony to produce a marketable and fantastic form of rebellion against the diminishing rewards of work in an industrializing corporate society.

The Hippodrome was the largest theater in the world when it opened in 1905 on a block-long stretch of Sixth Avenue between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets in Manhattan. It was ideally suited to this tight integration of location, method, message, and product. Thompson designed his mammoth novelty as a great showplace for the millions of New Yorkers who frequented the city's department stores, who filled his coffers at Luna Park, and who, in his mind, had thus far been priced out of the “best” Broadway theaters. Thompson intended the Hippodrome to be more than just a theater for all the people. He designed it as a kind of permanent world's fair exhibition palace, which would showcase a new sense of common purpose and possibility for urban Americans and move fun from the edge to the center of the metropolis.

Throughout his eleven seasons at Luna Park, the image of Fred Thompson as the fun-loving boy-capitalist on a spree was as much a feature of the park as its exaggerated “Oriental” architecture or the Shoot-the-Chutes. Thompson staged his performances to show that Luna Park was built by and for a new kind of man, one who would accept no less than all the fun to which he was entitled. Thompson, then, was largely indistinguishable from the Coney Island resort that he named for the continuously mutating moon: a radiant reflection of energy, never the same or in the same place from one moment to the next, the very representation of capricious and insatiable desire. Above all, he said, his park meant unceasing variety and change, “movement, movement, movement everywhere.” What was true of Luna Park would be true of Thompson; he was what he sold.

Thompson brought plays to Broadway after 1906 that were dramatic adaptations of Luna Park attractions and operated on his amusement credo that thrills “must get quicker and steeper and more joyously terrifying all the time if they are to succeed.” His productions, with few exceptions, were variations on melodrama, the 19th century's favorite form of theater. Exuberant in some instances, terrifying in others, but always didactic, his shows were especially attentive to the unease of middle-class men as they encountered and explored the unfamiliar landscape of desire. Again and again the word “fool” was enlisted to register his heroes' (as well as his own) confusion—they were fools to resist pleasure, fools to indulge in it, fools to let their appetites consume them. In other words, Thompson, through his melodramas of consumption, tried to contain the new market culture's divergent imperatives—to make money and to spend it, to work and to play—and to chart a path that enabled men to recognize and to exploit the opportunities that the world of goods offered.

On 13 October 1913, Fred Thompson summoned a crowd of children to a construction site on San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to consecrate the beginning of Toyland Grown Up, a fourteen-acre amusement park of animated fairy tales and nursery rhymes and hundred-foot-tall toys that he planned for the Joy Zone, the fair's boulevard of commercial amusement. Toyland was the clearest expression of the dreams that inspired and troubled his personal investment in Peter Pan culture. His newest “playground for the human race” took the form of a well-appointed playroom of an indulged middle-class child, with giant-sized toy figures strategically littered about its grounds as though an enormous four-year-old had abruptly abandoned them for other notions of fun. By the summer of 1915, when the venture wobbled on the edge of bankruptcy and even its most ardent supporter had decided that it was a delusion, the entire project, in retrospect, seemed doomed from the start.

Fred Thompson's determination to encourage visions of surplus and luxury placed him at the center of the development of early-20th-century consumer capitalism. Between 1890 and 1930, Americans laid the institutional foundation of its economy—department stores, advertising agencies, grand hotels and lavish saloons, restaurants, dance halls, and the great “world's fairs”—which showcased the marvelous array of consumer goods and technologies produced by the new industrial order. The architects of the urban marketplace enlisted these institutions and the social roles and practices associated with them not just to sell goods in new or more-effective ways, but to make consumer goods the very marrow of American life.

Fred Thompson died early on 6 June 1919 at St. Vincent's Hospital, New York, following an operation for a range of physical disorders involving gallstones, appendicitis, and hernia. He was buried next to his mother on the periphery of Woodlawn Cemetery, the scenic resting place in the Bronx for many of the City's most powerful financiers, industrialists, speculators, retailers, and stage personalities. Thompson had not mounted a major project in four years; his estate, after paying for his funeral, was valued at seven hundred dollars. So hard up was Thompson at the time of his death that a headstone was not placed on his grave until 1922, by which time his friends and former associates had collected enough money to commission a modest monument.