Life of james thurber

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

For the political scientist, see James A. Thurber.

James Thurber
Thurber in
Born	James Grover Thurber ()December 8, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.
Died	November 2, () (aged&#;66) New York Metropolis, U.S.
Resting place	Green Lawn Cemetery, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.
Occupation	Cartoonist author humorist journalist playwright
Period	–
Genre	Short stories, cartoons, essays
Subject	Humor, language
Notable works
Spouse	Althea Adams &#; &#; (m.&#;; div.&#;)&#; Helen Wismer &#; &#; (m.&#;)&#;
Children	1

James Grover Thurber (December 8, – November 2, ) was an American cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist, and playwright.

He was best acknowledged for his cartoons and compact stories, published mainly in The New Yorker and collected in his numerous books.

Thurber was one of the most widespread 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 (), The Battle of the Sexes (, based on Thurber's "The Catbird Seat"), and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (adapted twice, in and in ).

Life

Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, to Charles L.

Thurber and Mary Agnes "Mame" (née Fisher) Thurber on December 8, Both of his parents greatly influenced his operate. His father was a sporadically employed clerk and minor politician who dreamed of being a lawyer or an actor.

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.^[1]

Due to overcrowding in his grandfather's house, where his family had moved while his father recovered from an illness, Thurber often stayed at the home of his aunt, Margery Albright.

Albright lived in Downtown Columbus near Holy Cross Church, the clock and bell of which Thurber would reference in later writing.^[2][3]

When Thurber was seven years old, he and one of his brothers were playing a game of William Reveal , when his brother shot James in the eye with an arrow.^[4] He lost that eye, and the injury later caused him to become almost entirely blind.

He was unable to participate in sports and other activities in his childhood because of this injury, but he developed a creative mind, which he used to express himself in writings.^[1] Neurologist V.

S. Ramachandran suggests that Thurber's imagination may be partly explained by Charles Bonnet syndrome, a neurological condition that causes complex visual hallucinations in people who possess had some level of visual loss.^[5] (This was the basis for the piece "The Admiral on the Wheel".)

From to , Thurber attended Ohio Mention University where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and editor of the student magazine, the Sundial.

It was during this period that he rented the dwelling on 77 Jefferson Avenue,^[6] which became Thurber House in He never graduated from the university because his poor eyesight prevented him from taking a mandatory Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) course.^[7] In he was posthumously awarded a degree.^[8]

From to , 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 journalist for The Columbus Dispatch from to 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.^[8]

Move to New York

In , Thurber moved to Greenwich Village in Fresh York City, obtaining a employment as a reporter with the New York Evening Post.

He joined the staff of The New Yorker in as an editor, with the help of E. B. White, his acquaintance and fellow New Yorker contributor. His career as a cartoonist began in after White create 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 finer 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 s.^{[citation needed]}

Marriage and family

Thurber married Althea Adams in , although the marriage, as he later wrote to a friend, devolved into "a relationship charming, fine, and hurting".^[10] They lived in the Sanford–Curtis–Thurber House, in Fairfield County, Connecticut, with their daughter Rosemary^[11] (b.

).^[12][13][14] The marriage ended in divorce in May , and Althea kept^[15] Sanford–Curtis–Thurber House.^[1] He married his editor, Helen Muriel Wismer (–) in June ^[16] 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 Excellent Good Place", in Cornwall, Connecticut.^[17][18]

Death

Thurber's behavior became erratic in his last year.

Thurber was stricken with a blood clot on the brain on October 4, , 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.^[19]

Legacy and honors

Career

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 Modern Yorker.^[24]

Writer

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 Pup 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 Evening 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 Bloke 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 story "You Could Look It Up",^[25] about a three-foot adult being brought in to take a stroll in a baseball game, has been said^[26] to have inspired Bill Veeck's stunt with Eddie Gaedel with the St.

Louis Browns in , Veeck claimed an older provenance for the stunt.^[27]

In addition to his other fiction, Thurber wrote more than seventy-five fables, some of which were first published in The New Yorker (), then poised in Fables for Our Moment and Famous Poems Illustrated () and Further Fables for Our Time ().

These were concise 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 society as an uncertain, precarious place, where few reliable guidelines exist."^[28] His stories also included several book-length fairy tales, such as The White Deer (), The 13 Clocks () and The Wonderful O ().

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 Unused 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.^[29]

Thurber wrote a five-part New Yorker series, between and , 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 (), under the section title "Soapland." The series was one of the first to examine such a pop-culture phenomenon in depth.^[30]

The last twenty years of Thurber's being 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 (), Thurber Country (), and the extremely popular book about New Yorker founder/editor Harold Ross, The Years with Ross (). A number of Thurber's brief stories were made into movies, including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in

Cartoonist

While Thurber drew his cartoons in the usual fashion in the s and s, his failing eyesight later required changes.

He drew them on very large sheets of paper using a plump black crayon (or on dark 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 favor he drew them under liquid. Dorothy ParkerThe last drawing Thurber completed was a self-portrait in yellow crayon on black manuscript, which was featured as the cover of Time magazine on July 9, ^[31] The matching drawing was used for the dust jacket of The Thurber Album ().

Adaptations

• Thurber teamed with college schoolmate (and actor/director) Elliott Nugent to write The Male Animal, a comic drama that became a major Broadway punch in The play was adapted as a film by the same name in , starring Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland and Jack Carson.
• In his brief story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", was loosely adapted as a film by the same name.

  Danny Kaye played the title character.

• In United Productions of America announced an animated feature to be based on Thurber's work, titled Men, Women and Dogs.^[32] The only part of the ambitious project that was eventually released was the UPA cartoon The Unicorn in the Garden ().^[33]
• In , Thurber's short story "One Is a Wanderer" was adapted for General Electric Theatre,^[34] resulting in Emmy nominations for writer Samuel Taylor and director Herschel Daugherty.^[35]
• The movie The Battle of the Sexes was based on Thurber's concise story "The Catbird Seat".
• In , Thurber fulfilled a long-standing wish to be on the professional stage and played himself in 88 performances of the revue A Thurber Carnival (which echoes the title of his manual, 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.^[36] Thurber received a Special Tony Award for the adapted script of the Carnival.^[37]

• In , "The Secret Being 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 –70, a full series based on Thurber's writings and experience, 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 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 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 , a new adaptation of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was produced, starring Ben Stiller as the title character.

In accepted culture

• In Season Nine, Episode 13 of Seinfeld, titled “The Cartoon”, Elaine mentions learning of gossip about Thurber while interviewing for a job at The Modern Yorker.^[38]
• Beginning during his own father's terminal illness, television broadcaster Keith Olbermann read excerpts from Thurber's short stories during the closing segment of his MSNBC program Countdown with Keith Olbermann on Fridays, which he called "Fridays with Thurber".^[39] He reintroduced this during the COVID pandemic of , reading Thurber stories daily at &#;p.m.

  EDT on Twitter, and continued on his podcast, also called Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

• On an episode of Norm Macdonald's video podcast, Norm Macdonald Live, Norm tells a story in which comedian Larry Miller acknowledges that his biggest shape in comedy was Thurber.
• In motion picture The French Dispatch by Wes Anderson, he was mentioned in the end title credits as inspiration.

Bibliography

Books

75th anniv.

edition () with foreword by John Updike, ISBN&#;

• The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities,
• The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments,
• My Life and Hard Times, , ISBN&#;
• The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze,
• Let Your Mind Alone!

  and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces,

• The Last Flower, , reissued , ISBN&#;
• Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated, , ISBN&#;
• My World—And Welcome to It, , ISBN&#;
• Men, Women and Dogs,
• The Thurber Carnival (anthology), , ISBN&#;,

ISBN&#; (Modern Library Edition)

• The Beast in Me and Other Animals, , ISBN&#;X
• The Thurber Album,
• Thurber Country,
• Thurber's Dogs,
• Further Fables for Our Time,
• Alarms and Diversions (anthology),
• The Years with Ross, , ISBN&#;
• Lanterns and Lances,

Children's books

Plays

Posthumous books

• Credos and Curios, (ed.

  Helen W. Thurber)

• Thurber & Company, (ed. Helen W. Thurber)
• Selected Letters of James Thurber, (ed. Helen W. Thurber & Edward Weeks) ISBN&#;
• Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself, (ed.

  Michael J. Rosen)

• Thurber on Crime, (ed. Robert Lopresti) ISBN&#;
• People Have More Fun Than Anybody: A Centennial Celebration of Drawings and Writings by James Thurber, (ed. Michael J. Rosen) ISBN&#;^[40]
• James Thurber: Writings and Drawings (anthology), , (ed.

  Garrison Keillor), Library of America, ISBN&#;

• The Pup Department: James Thurber on Hounds, Scotties, and Talking Poodles, (ed. Michael J. Rosen) ISBN&#;
• The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber, (ed.

  Harrison Kinney, with Rosemary A. Thurber) ISBN&#;

• Collected Fables, (ed. Michael J. Rosen), ISBN
• A Mile and a Half of Lines: The Art of James Thurber, (ed.

  James Thurber was an American writer and artist. One of the most popular humorists (writers of clever humor) of his time, Thurber celebrated in stories and in cartoons the comic frustrations of eccentric yet ordinary people.

  Michael J. Rosen) ISBN&#;

Short stories

See also

References

Further reading

Interviews

Transcript of Alistair Cooke's Interview With James Thurber on Omnibus (U.S.

TV series)^[1]

Biographies of Thurber

• Bernstein, Burton. Thurber. William Morrow & Co. ISBN&#;
• Fensch, Thomas. The Male Who Was Walter Mitty: The Life and Work of James Thurber.

  ISBN&#;

• Grauer, Neil A. Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber. University of Nebraska Urge . ISBN&#;
• Kinney, Harrison. James Thurber: His Life and Times. Henry Holt & Co. ISBN&#;

Literature review

• Holmes, Charles S.

  The Clocks Of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber Atheneum. ISBN&#;

External links

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

The Ohio State University Libraries Infrequent Books and Manuscripts Collection

Works