James Thurber: Difference between revisions

 

Line 47: Line 47:

Thurber attended [[East High School (Columbus, Ohio)|East High School]], starting in September 1909. He was a favourite with the teachers. A classmate recalls him as a “much better [writer] than the rest of us … He was constantly drawing, and then throwing the drawings away, as if he had no further use for them”.<ref>Bernstein (1975), p. 29.</ref> His first published story, “The Third Bullet”, appeared in the high school magazine, ”X-rays”; it was a western, and showed “not the slightest clue of literary promise”, according to his biographer Burton Bernstein.<ref>Bernstein (1975), pp. 30-31.</ref> Another biographer, Harrison Kinney, agrees that Thurber showed no sign of literary precocity, and that his high school years were not remarkable in any way. Thurber himself considered that he was a “late bloomer”.<ref>Kinney (1995), pp. 114-115.</ref>

Thurber attended [[East High School (Columbus, Ohio)|East High School]], starting in September 1909. He was a favourite with the teachers. A classmate recalls him as a “much better [writer] than the rest of us … He was constantly drawing, and then throwing the drawings away, as if he had no further use for them”.<ref>Bernstein (1975), p. 29.</ref> His first published story, “The Third Bullet”, appeared in the high school magazine, ”X-rays”; it was a western, and showed “not the slightest clue of literary promise”, according to his biographer Burton Bernstein.<ref>Bernstein (1975), pp. 30-31.</ref> Another biographer, Harrison Kinney, agrees that Thurber showed no sign of literary precocity, and that his high school years were not remarkable in any way. Thurber himself considered that he was a “late bloomer”.<ref>Kinney (1995), pp. 114-115.</ref>

In about 1913 the Thurbers moved to 77 Jefferson Avenue.<ref>Kinney (1995), p. 1081.</ref><ref name=”:5″>Bernstein (1975), p. 36.</ref>{{#tag:ref|Bernstein says the move was “by 1912″,<ref name=”:5″ /> but Kinney says it took place in 1913.|group=note}} The house was the setting for Thurber’s story “The Night the Ghost Got In”,<ref name=”:5″ /> and is now maintained as an arts center and museum.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Thurber House — Literary Center and James Thurber Museum |url=https://www.thurberhouse.org/ |access-date=December 13, 2025 |website=Thurber House |language=en-US |ref=none}}</ref>

In about 1913 the Thurbers moved to 77 Jefferson Avenue.<ref>Kinney (1995), p. 1081.</ref><ref name=”:5″>Bernstein (1975), p. 36.</ref>{{#tag:ref|Bernstein says the move was “by 1912″,<ref name=”:5″ /> but Kinney says it took place in 1913.|group=note}} The house was the setting for Thurber’s story “The Night the Ghost Got In”,<ref name=”:5″ /> and is now maintained as an arts center and museum.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Thurber House — Literary Center and James Thurber Museum |url=https://www.thurberhouse.org/ |access-date=December 13, 2025 |website=Thurber House |language=en-US |ref=none}}</ref>

[[File:James Thurber 1.jpg|thumb|upright|Thurber at age 14]]

[[File:James Thurber 1.jpg|thumb|upright|Thurber at age 14]]

American cartoonist, author, journalist, and playwright (1894–1961)

James Thurber
Thurber in 1954
Born	James Grover Thurber (1894-12-08)December 8, 1894
Died	November 2, 1961(1961-11-02) (aged 66) New York City, U.S.
Resting place	Green Lawn Cemetery, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.
Occupation	Cartoonist author humorist journalist playwright
Period	1929–1961
Genre	Short stories, cartoons, essays
Subject	Humor, language
Notable works
Spouse	Althea Adams ​ ​ (m. 1925; div. 1935)​ Helen Wismer ​ ​ (m. 1935)​
Children	1

James Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894 – November 2, 1961) was an American cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist, and playwright. He was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in The New Yorker and collected in his numerous books.

Thurber was one of the most popular humorists of his time and celebrated the comic frustrations and eccentricities of ordinary people. His works have frequently been adapted into films, including The Male Animal (1942), The Battle of the Sexes (1959, based on Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat“), and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (adapted twice, in 1947 and in 2013).

James Grover Thurber (known as “Jamie” to his family) was born in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 1894. His father, Charles Leander Thurber,^{[note 1]} was a clerk working for the Ohio Republican Party at the time James was born; his wife, Mary Agnes Fisher (known as “Mame”) was from a wealthy local family. The couple were given stock in the Fisher Company, a produce company founded by Mame’s father, when they married, and the income from this stock supplemented Charles’ meager salary. James was the middle son of three; his older brother, William, was born in 1893, and Robert was born in 1896.^[1] In 1900 Charles lost his job when Asa Bushnell, the Republican governor of Ohio, lost the gubernatorial election.^[2] At some point in 1901 Charles was appointed to the staff of David K. Watson, who had been appointed to lead a Justice Department commission by President McKinley, and in April 1902 Charles moved the family to Washington D.C.^[3][4]

The Thurbers rented a house in Falls Church, Virginia that August.^[4] One Sunday while they were in Falls Church, James and William were playing with a bow and arrow in the yard, and William told James to stand facing the fence so William could try to hit him in the back with a blunt arrow. James turned around just as William shot, and the arrow hit James in his left eye. After the initial shock the eye was not very painful, and Mame took James to a local doctor to have it treated. A few days later it was hurting, and Charles and Mame took him to a specialist in Washington, who removed the eye.^{[5][note 2]}

In 1902 Charles lost his job with the federal government, and the Thurbers moved back to Columbus in June 1903.^[6][7] Charles fell ill in 1904, and when he did not recover quickly the family moved into Mame’s parents house.^[8] James hated living there, and arrangements were made for him to stay frequently with Margery Albright, the practical nurse who had attended his birth. Albright was known as Aunt Margery to the family, and between 1905 and 1910 James stayed with her often, sometimes for weeks at a time. James’ brother Robert later described Albright as “a second mother” to James.^[9] Charles recovered after a few months, and by 1906 the Thurbers were living in Norwich Hotel.^[10]

James missed a year of school in Washington. He was enrolled in Sullivant Elementary School in Columbus, a year behind his age group, but was not the oldest in his grade—it was in a working-class area and many pupils were several years behind in their schooling.^[11] In third grade he met Eva Prout at Sullivant; they shared classes for the next six years. By the seventh grade he was infatuated with her. Prout left school after the eighth grade to pursue a singing and acting career, and Thurber occasionally saw her in silent movies over the next few years.^[12]

Thurber spent seventh and eighth grades at Douglas Junior High School. He was more successful socially there than he had been at Sullivant, and was chosen to write the Class Prophecy in 1909, in eighth grade. This was a common essay format at the time. Thurber imagined his schoolmates and himself in an adventure in a flying machine, in which the class appears to be doomed, but were surprised “to see James Thurber walking out on the beam”, over the side of the plane, to remove a rope that was tangling a piece of equipment. The class “learned that James was a tight-rope walker with Barnsels and Ringbailey’s circus”. The story includes made-up technical terms such as “hythenometer” and “curobater”, and is considered by Thurber scholars to contain the roots of the ideas that would later become Thurber’s story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty“.^[13][14]

Thurber attended East High School, starting in September 1909. He was a favourite with the teachers. A classmate recalls him as a “much better [writer] than the rest of us … He was constantly drawing, and then throwing the drawings away, as if he had no further use for them”.^[15] His first published story, “The Third Bullet”, appeared in the high school magazine, X-rays; it was a western, and showed “not the slightest clue of literary promise”, according to his biographer Burton Bernstein.^[16] Another biographer, Harrison Kinney, agrees that Thurber showed no sign of literary precocity, and that his high school years were not remarkable in any way. Thurber himself considered that he was a “late bloomer”.^[17]

In about 1913 the Thurbers moved to 77 Jefferson Avenue.^{[18][19][note 3]} The house was the setting for Thurber’s story “The Night the Ghost Got In”,^[19] and is now maintained as an arts center and museum.^[20]

From 1913 to 1918, Thurber attended Ohio State University where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and editor of the student magazine, the Sundial. It was during this time that he rented the house on 77 Jefferson Avenue,^[21] which became Thurber House in 1984. He never graduated from the university because his poor eyesight prevented him from taking a mandatory Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) course.^[22] In 1995 he was posthumously awarded a degree.^[23]

From 1918 to 1920, Thurber worked as a code clerk for the United States Department of State, first in Washington, D.C., and then at the embassy in Paris. On returning to Columbus, he began his career as a reporter for The Columbus Dispatch from 1921 to 1924. During part of this time, he reviewed books, films, and plays in a weekly column called “Credos and Curios”, a title that was given to a posthumous collection of his work. Thurber returned to Paris during this period, where he wrote for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.^[23]

In 1925, Thurber moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, obtaining a job as a reporter with the New York Evening Post. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1927 as an editor, with the help of E. B. White, his friend and fellow New Yorker contributor. His career as a cartoonist began in 1930 after White found some of Thurber’s drawings in a trash can and submitted them for publication; White inked-in some of these earlier drawings to make them reproduce better for the magazine, and years later expressed deep regret he had done such a thing. Thurber contributed both his writings and his drawings to The New Yorker until the 1950s.^{[citation needed]}

Thurber married Althea Adams in 1922, although the marriage, as he later wrote to a friend, devolved into “a relationship charming, fine, and hurting”.^[25] They lived in the Sanford–Curtis–Thurber House, in Fairfield County, Connecticut, with their daughter Rosemary^[26] (b. 1931).^[27][28][29] The marriage ended in divorce in May 1935, and Althea kept^[30] Sanford–Curtis–Thurber House.^[31] He married his editor, Helen Muriel Wismer (1902–1986) in June 1935.^[32] After meeting Mark Van Doren on a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, Thurber began summering in Cornwall, Connecticut, along with many other prominent artists and authors of the time. After three years of renting, Thurber found a home, which he referred to as “The Great Good Place”, in Cornwall, Connecticut.^[33][34]

Thurber’s behavior became erratic in his last year. Thurber was stricken with a blood clot on the brain on October 4, 1961, and underwent emergency surgery, drifting in and out of consciousness. Although the operation was initially successful, Thurber died a few weeks later, on November 2, aged 66, due to complications from pneumonia. The doctors said his brain was senescent from several small strokes and hardening of the arteries. His last words, aside from the repeated word “God”, were “God bless… God damn”, according to his wife, Helen.^[35]

Thurber also became well known for his simple, outlandish drawings and cartoons. Both his literary and his drawing skills were helped along by the support of, and collaboration with, fellow New Yorker staff member E. B. White, who insisted that Thurber’s sketches could stand on their own as artistic expressions. Thurber drew six covers and numerous classic illustrations for The New Yorker.^[36]

Many of Thurber’s short stories are humorous fictional memoirs from his life, but he also wrote darker material, such as “The Whip-Poor-Will”, a story of madness and murder. His best-known short stories are “The Dog That Bit People” and “The Night the Bed Fell“; they can be found in My Life and Hard Times, which was his “break-out” book. Among his other classics are “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty“, “The Catbird Seat“, “The Night the Ghost Got In”, “A Couple of Hamburgers“, “The Greatest Man in the World”, and “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox“. The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze has several short stories with a tense undercurrent of marital discord. The book was published the year of his divorce and remarriage.

Although his 1941 story “You Could Look It Up”,^[37] about a three-foot adult being brought in to take a walk in a baseball game, has been said^[38] to have inspired Bill Veeck‘s stunt with Eddie Gaedel with the St. Louis Browns in 1951, Veeck claimed an older provenance for the stunt.^[39]

In addition to his other fiction, Thurber wrote more than seventy-five fables, some of which were first published in The New Yorker (1939), then collected in Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956). These were short stories that featured anthropomorphic animals (e.g. “The Little Girl and the Wolf”, his version of Little Red Riding Hood) as main characters, and ended with a moral as a tagline. An exception to this format was his most famous fable, “The Unicorn in the Garden“, which featured an all-human cast except for the unicorn, which does not speak. Thurber’s fables were satirical, and the morals served as punch lines as well as advice to the reader, demonstrating “the complexity of life by depicting the world as an uncertain, precarious place, where few reliable guidelines exist.”^[40] His stories also included several book-length fairy tales, such as The White Deer (1945), The 13 Clocks (1950) and The Wonderful O (1957). The latter two were among several of Thurber’s works illustrated by Marc Simont.

Thurber’s prose for The New Yorker and other venues included numerous humorous essays. A favorite subject, especially toward the end of his life, was the English language. Pieces on this subject included “The Spreading ‘You Know’,” which decried the overuse of that pair of words in conversation, “The New Vocabularianism”, and “What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?”. His short pieces – whether stories, essays or something in between – were referred to as “casuals” by Thurber and the staff of The New Yorker.^[41]

Thurber wrote a five-part New Yorker series, between 1947 and 1948, examining in depth the radio soap opera phenomenon, based on near-constant listening and researching over the same period. Leaving nearly no element of these programs unexamined, including their writers, producers, sponsors, performers, and listeners alike, Thurber republished the series in his anthology, The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948), under the section title “Soapland.” The series was one of the first to examine such a pop-culture phenomenon in depth.^[42]

The last twenty years of Thurber’s life were filled with material and professional success in spite of his blindness. He published at least fourteen books in that era, including The Thurber Carnival (1945), Thurber Country (1953), and the extremely popular book about New Yorker founder/editor Harold Ross, The Years with Ross (1959). A number of Thurber’s short stories were made into movies, including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in 1947.

While Thurber drew his cartoons in the usual fashion in the 1920s and 1930s, his failing eyesight later required changes. He drew them on very large sheets of paper using a thick black crayon (or on black paper using white chalk, from which they were photographed and the colors reversed for publication). Regardless of method, his cartoons became as noted as his writings; they possessed an eerie, wobbly feel that seems to mirror his idiosyncratic view on life. He once wrote that people said it looked like he drew them under water. Dorothy Parker, a contemporary and friend of Thurber, referred to his cartoons as having the “semblance of unbaked cookies”. The last drawing Thurber completed was a self-portrait in yellow crayon on black paper, which was featured as the cover of Time magazine on July 9, 1951.^[43] The same drawing was used for the dust jacket of The Thurber Album (1952).

• Thurber teamed with college schoolmate (and actor/director) Elliott Nugent to write The Male Animal, a comic drama that became a major Broadway hit in 1939. The play was adapted as a film by the same name in 1942, starring Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland and Jack Carson.
• In 1947 his short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty“, was loosely adapted as a film by the same name. Danny Kaye played the title character.
• In 1951 United Productions of America announced an animated feature to be based on Thurber’s work, titled Men, Women and Dogs.^[44] The only part of the ambitious project that was eventually released was the UPA cartoon The Unicorn in the Garden (1953).^[45]
• In 1958, Thurber’s short story “One Is a Wanderer” was adapted for General Electric Theatre,^[46] resulting in Emmy nominations for writer Samuel Taylor and director Herschel Daugherty.^[47]
• The 1959 film The Battle of the Sexes was based on Thurber’s 1942 short story “The Catbird Seat“.
• In 1960, Thurber fulfilled a long-standing desire to be on the professional stage and played himself in 88 performances of the revue A Thurber Carnival (which echoes the title of his 1945 book, The Thurber Carnival). It was based on a selection of Thurber’s stories and cartoon captions. Thurber appeared in the sketch “File and Forget”. The sketch consists of Thurber dictating a series of letters in a vain attempt to keep one of his publishers from sending him books he did not order, and the escalating confusion of the replies.^[48] Thurber received a Special Tony Award for the adapted script of the Carnival.^[49]
• In 1961, “The Secret Life of James Thurber” aired on The DuPont Show with June Allyson. Adolphe Menjou appeared in the program as Fitch, and Orson Bean and Sue Randall portrayed John and Ellen Monroe.
• In 1969–70, a full series based on Thurber’s writings and life, titled My World … and Welcome to It, was broadcast on NBC. It starred William Windom as the Thurber figure, John Monroe. Featuring animated portions in addition to live actors, the show won a 1970 Emmy Award as the year’s best comedy series. Windom won an Emmy as well. He went on to perform Thurber material in a one-man stage show.
• In 1972 another film adaptation, The War Between Men and Women, starring Jack Lemmon, concludes with an animated version of Thurber’s classic anti-war work “The Last Flower”.
• In 2013, a new adaptation of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was produced, starring Ben Stiller as the title character.

Thurber described his mother as a “born comedian” and “one of the finest comic talents I think I have ever known”. She was a practical joker and on one occasion pretended to be disabled, and attended a faith healer revival only to jump up and proclaim herself healed.^[31]

Transcript of Alistair Cooke‘s Interview With James Thurber on Omnibus (U.S. TV series) Shanley, John Patrick (March 5, 1956). “TV: James Thurber; Alistair Cooke’s Interview With Humorist on ‘Omnibus’ Is Fine Entertainment Ewell in Melodrama”. The New York Times. Archived from the original on August 31, 2024. Retrieved April 24, 2023.

• Bernstein, Burton. 1975. Thurber. William Morrow & Co. ISBN 9780396070276
• Fensch, Thomas. 2001. The Man Who Was Walter Mitty: The Life and Work of James Thurber. ISBN 9780738840833
• Grauer, Neil A. 1994. Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 9780803221550
• Holmes, Charles S. 1972. The Clocks Of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber Atheneum. ISBN 9780689705748
• Kinney, Harrison. 1995. James Thurber: His Life and Times. Henry Holt & Co. ISBN 9780805039665

Provided to YouTube by Masterworks Broadway; ℗ Originally released 1960 Sony Music Entertainment

The Ohio State University Libraries Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection

Works