Nineteen years younger than his brother Pierre, Thomas Corneille dedicated his whole life to follow the path of his older brother. He studied with the Jesuits and, after a brilliant degree in humanities, became a lawyer, like his brother. He married Pierre's sister-in-law and left Rouen for Paris at the same time as him, when his brother's triumphs lead him to the theater.

He married Marguerite de Lampérière, daughter of a notable of Andelys, while his brother Pierre married her sister Marie. Like Pierre, he first made comedies, drawn mostly from Spanish authors (he was inspired by Jodelet Astrologue de d'Ouville to write his Feint Astrologue in 1648 and his Devineresse in 1679) and even managed to compete victoriously with Scarron in the field of burlesque comedy, his "Geôlier de soi-même".

In November 1656, he made his debut on the tragic stage with Timocrates, whose theme was taken from the novel Cleopatra by La Calprenède, and which was a great success with an uninterrupted run of - according to legend - eighty performances, the longest in his entire century.

He wrote about forty plays, alone or in collaboration. Unlike his brother, he devoted himself to all dramatic genres, including mechanical theater (his plays Circé (March 17, 1675), Le Triomphe des dames (August 7, 1676) and La Pierre philosophale (February 23, 1681), with music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, were among the most successful of the century), opera and comedy with interludes. His three opera librettos, Psyché (1678), Bellérophon (1679) and Médée (1693), made him, along with Philippe Quinault and Jean Galbert de Campistron, one of the most important French librettists of the 17th century.

Together with his co-writer Donneau de Visé, he received more than 6,000 livres for La Devineresse ou les Faux Enchantements, the largest sum paid at the time. Finally, one of his plays, Le Baron des Fondrières, had the honor of being the first to be booed off the stage.

In 1677, four years after Molière's death, at the request of his widow, Armande Béjart, she put into verse the play Molière had created in 1665 under the title Le Festin de pierre (renamed Don Juan ou le Festin de pierre in 1682), taking advantage of the occasion to soften the most daring passages. This version was performed at the Théâtre Guénégaud under the same title (Le Festin de pierre) and Molière's name (Thomas Corneille did not publish the play under his own name until 1683). After the merger of the Parisian companies in 1680, it was transferred to the Comédie-Française and performed again until the mid-1840s.

In 1685, he succeeded at the Académie Française to the chair of his brother who had died the previous year, and produced a new edition of the Notes de Vaugelas in 1687, before tackling, in 1694, a Dictionnaire des termes des arts et des sciences in addition to the Académie's dictionary and then to a Dictionnaire historique et géographique universel in 1708. He had also produced a complete translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in 1697.