James Thurber

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 favorite 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] Thurber graduated from East High in June, and was accepted at Ohio State University, beginning classes in September that year.^[21] A highlight of his freshman year was a test given by Albert Weiss, Thurber's psychology professor, which made it apparent that Thurber had an astonishingly good memory. Thurber was proud of his performance and often mentioned it to acquaintances throughout his life.^[22] He also took English Composition, which focused on paragraphing, a form of humorous writing popular in newspapers of the day. Robert O. Ryder, the editor of the Ohio State Journal, was a popular paragrapher of the time, and Thurber was a great admirer of his work.^[23] There were two compulsory classes: Military Science and Tactics, and Gym: Thurber hated both.^[24][21] The military science class was taught by Captain Converse, who took a dislike to Thurber, who was incompetent at military drill.^[21] Thurber started to miss both gym and military drill classes:^[21] as a result, although only two years of the military class were required to graduate, Thurber had to register for the class in each of the five years he attended Ohio State.^[25]

Thurber's grades were good in his first year, but socially it went badly. His best friend, Ed Morris, abandoned Thurber after Morris joined a fraternity that would not accept Thurber. Only one fraternity was interested in Thurber, but he was eventually blackballed: socially, in Bernstein's words, this was "akin to a terminal case of leprosy".^[25][21] Thurber registered for classes for the 1914 fall semester, but dropped out of college for a year, spending his time at libraries instead. He was living at home, but his family did not realize he was not attending classes.^[26][27] He began taking classes again in the fall of 1915, but continued to miss the drill classes, and as a result was briefly forbidden from registering for the spring semester. After a meeting with Converse the ban was lifted, but he earned no credits that semester and may not have attended any classes. William Oxley Thompson, the president of the university, intervened to prevent another ban in the fall of 1916, and Thurber returned to class once again.^[28]

Thurber worked on both the Ohio State student publications: the Sundial, a monthly magazine, and the Ohio State Lantern, a newspaper; and became friends with Elliott Nugent, who was also writing for the Lantern.^[29] Nugent was much more successful than Thurber socially,^[30] and along with Jack Pierce, another student working on the Lantern, decided to get Thurber into Phi Kappa Psi, one of the most prestigious fraternities at Ohio State.^[31] Others in the fraternity were initially unconvinced: Thurber didn't seem to have the money required to join an expensive fraternity, and seemed unlikely to fit in socially. He was eventually accepted that winter.^[32] Thurber became editor-in-chief of the Sundial the next academic year (1917-1918), and chose Nugent as his assistant editor.^[29] He was called up for military service, and immediately rejected because of his missing eye,^[33] but many of his fellow students were now serving in the armed forces, and Thurber wrote much of the Sundial's material himself.^[34] Thurber finally became well-known and well-liked on campus, and both he and Nugent were nominated to Sphinx, an exclusive society for high-profile students.^[34] That year Thurber decided to leave OSU—without a degree, as he had not completed the mandatory graduation requirements. In January 1918 he applied for a job with the State Department, with the help of a recommendation letter from Thompson.^[35][36]

Thurber was hired as a code clerk, and moved to Washington, D.C. on June 21, 1918. After several months of training he was assigned to the American Embassy in Paris;^[38] he arrived in France on November 13, two days after the Armistice.^[39] While in Washington and Paris Thurber corresponded with both Eva Prouts, whom he had idealized for years, and with Minnette Fritts, a popular student at Ohio State whom he had dated in Columbus.^[40] He asked Prouts to marry him in one of his letters; she refused, insisting that they meet in person before she could commit herself.^[41] Thurber had become an admirer of Henry James at Ohio State, and had thought of retaining his virginity "for his Jamesian ideal" woman, but he lost his virginity to a dancer at the Folies Bergeres.^[42] By the time he left Paris he was conflicted about his experiences: Thurber's sixteen months in Paris was in some ways when he matured,^[43] but he came home guilty and depressed.^[41] He left Paris in February 1920 and returned to Columbus.^[44] Fritts was married by the time Thurber came home, and he began a more intense courtship of Prouts, who had quit her acting career because the film industry was much reduced by the war, and was now living in Zanesville, Ohio. By the end of 1920 she had rejected him.^[45]

Thurber worked briefly for the Ohio Department of Agriculture in the summer of 1920, while considering a return to Ohio State and also applying for newspaper jobs.^[46] In August 1920 Thurber was hired as a reporter for The Columbus Dispatch,^[47] and after a few weeks was assigned to cover Columbus City Hall.^[48] The pay began at $25 a week, and by the time Thurber left in 1924 had only risen to $40 a week.^[49] He took second jobs to augment his income: he was a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, and did publicity work for Columbus's Indianola Park and Majestic Theatre.^[50]

He became friends with John McNulty, and Joel Sayre, then journalists for the Ohio State Journal, and Herman Miller, who was teaching English at Ohio State University.^[51][52] Miller and Thurber were involved with The Strollers, an Ohio State dramatic society. Only one of The Strollers' performances is known to have been by Thurber: Psychomania, a spoof of Freudianism, which was performed at Christmas 1922.^[53] Thurber was also active in The Scarlet Mask Club, the college's musical theatre group, and wrote and directed (and sometimes performed in) their annual show from 1921 to 1924.^[54] He met Althea Adams, an Ohio State student, at The Strollers in 1921. Adams had been elected an Ohio State "Rosebud" and "Magic Mirror", both title given to accomplished and beautiful women students, and many of Thurber's and Adams' acquaintances thought they were an odd couple when they began dating.^[55][56] They married in May 1922, and spent a honeymoon week as guests of Elliott Nugent and his wife, in Connecticut, where they went to see a play together every night. Neither Thurber nor his new wife were well off, and Thurber reviewed each of the plays for the Dispatch in order to make some extra income.^[57] On their return to Columbus, James and Althea moved out of James's parents' house into an apartment.^[58]

Starting in early 1923, the Dispatch gave Thurber a half-page every Sunday to write whatever he wanted. He titled the column "Credos and Curios", and filled it with a mixture of literary criticism, humorous writing, verse, and commentary.^[59][60] The column was canceled by the publisher in December, to Thurber's disappointment,^[61] and Althea persuaded him to try his hand at writing full-time.^[62] A friend offered the use of a cottage in Jay, in upstate New York, for the summer, and Thurber left the Dispatch,^[62] but his efforts met with little success: he sold one story to The Kansas City Star, and a short piece to the New York World, but The Saturday Evening Post and The American Mercury rejected everything he submitted.^[63] The Thurbers returned to Columbus in late 1924.^[63] The Dispatch did not rehire Thurber, but he was paid his work for the Scarlet Mask that winter, and he picked up more publicity work, with the result that he earned more over the next few months than if he had kept his newspaper job.^[64]

Althea was still confident that Thurber could succeed as a writer, and in May 1925 the Thurbers left Columbus again, this time for France.^[64][65] They spent several weeks traveling in France, Switzerland, and Italy, sightseeing. In July they rented a cottage in Granville, in Normandy, and Thurber wrote the first five thousand words of a novel. Althea read it, and the two of them agreed it was terrible. He abandoned the manuscript and never tried to write a novel again.^[65] The Thurbers initially decided to return to the US, but a pleasant evening at a café in Paris convinced them to stay, and Thurber got a job with the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, rewriting stories from French newspapers in English.^[66][67] There was stiff competition among expatriate Americans to work at the Tribune, but Thurber's four years at the Dispatch and his ability to write newspaper headlines got him the job immediately.^[66] Among Thurber's colleagues at the Tribune was a young William Shirer, and the two became close friends.^[68][69] Shirer later recalled the material they wrote as "primarily a work of the imagination", since they were given so little material from the original story to work with.^[68] Thurber was able to produce a column about Christy Mathewson's career entirely from his knowlege of baseball, when Mathewson died, but on other topics, such as Admiral Richard Byrd's flight over the North Pole, or the history of the Polish złoty, he was less reliable.^[70]

Thurber's salary was low, and to supplement it he wrote articles in his off-hours, sending them to his agent in New York. His most prestigious sale was to Harper's Magazine; the money arrived just in time to pay off accumulating debts.^[71] Towards the end of the year he was sent to Nice, on the Mediterranean coast, to work on the Tribune's Riviera edition.^[72] His assignments included coverage of the tennis match between Helen Wills and Suzanne Lenglen, known as the Match of the Century,^[73][74] and interviewing Isadora Duncan after her husband died—she had not heard of his death and learnt of it from Thurber when he met with her.^[74] Althea was also now working for the Tribune, as society editor, but despite the extra income they were going further into debt, and Thurber decided he had to return to the US, feeling that his best chance of making a living from writing was in New York.^[75] The Thurbers' time on the French Riviera was for a while the most idyllic period of his marriage,^[72] but there were problems in the relationship.^[76][77] Althea was more interested in sex than James was, and their sex lives were "a frustration to them both".^[77] Althea decided not to return to the US at the same time as James,^[76] and stayed in Nice for a couple of months after he sailed for New York.^{[77][note 4]}

Thurber arrived in New York in June 1926, rented an apartment and began submitting his pieces to The New Yorker, which had been launched only a year earlier, but everything he sent in was quickly rejected.^[78][79] He wrote a thirty-thousand-word parody of several then-bestselling books, but no publishers were interested.^{[80][note 5]} In Paris in 1925 Thurber had been offered a job at the New York Evening Post, and had turned it down; he was able to get the offer renewed and now accepted it. He also made another substantial sale: a humorous piece that took up half a page of the New York World and brought in $40.^[80] Thurber started on the city desk, and was soon moved to writing feature articles, including interviews with Thomas Edison and the widow of Harry Houdini.^[81] He kept trying to sell to The New Yorker, eventually accumulating twenty rejections. One day Althea suggested he set a timer and complete an article in forty-five minutes; he tried it, sent it to The New Yorker, and it sold immediately.^[82]

In February 1927 Thurber met E. B. White at a party in Greenwich village. White was working at The New Yorker, and helped Thurber to get hired there. He began as an editor, with long hours, often seven days a week, with very little time for writing.^[83] Harold Ross, the editor-in-chief, agreed to "demote" him (as Thurber put it) to a writer instead of an editor late that year.^[84][85] Thurber had produced a handful of short pieces to the magazine even while working as an editor, and became a mainstay of the magazine once he gave up editorial duties.^[86] One of his first sales to the magazine in this period was "Menaces in May" a short story—not a humorous piece—with heavily autobiographical elements. The protagonist, whose sophisticated wife, Lydia, is away from home, meets an old flame and her husband, wonders what life would have been like with her, and later blames Lydia for the dull state of his life. The old flame was based on Eva Prout. This was following by a series of humorous pieces about a Mr. Monroe and his efficient, sophisticated, emasculating wife; each episode was based on something that had happened between James and Althea.^[87] The Thurber's marriage was still in difficulties; by the time Thurber was hired by The New Yorker Althea was sleeping with other men, without concealing her affairs from James,^[88][89] and at one point Althea went to Europe without James for two months.^[90]

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.

The Thurbers lived in the Sanford–Curtis–Thurber House, in Fairfield County, Connecticut, with their daughter Rosemary^[91] (b. 1931).^[92][93][94] The marriage ended in divorce in May 1935, and Althea kept^[95] Sanford–Curtis–Thurber House.^[96] He married his editor, Helen Muriel Wismer (1902–1986) in June 1935.^[97] 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.^[98][99]

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.^[100]

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.^[101]

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",^[102] about a three-foot adult being brought in to take a walk in a baseball game, has been said^[103] 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.^[104]

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."^[105] 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.^[106]

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.^[107]

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.^[108] The same drawing was used for the dust jacket of The Thurber Album (1952).

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.^[96]

In 1995 he was posthumously awarded a degree by Ohio State University.^[109]

• Established in 1997, the annual Thurber Prize honors outstanding examples of American humor.^[110]
• In 2008, the Library of America selected Thurber's story "A Sort of Genius", first published in The New Yorker, for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.^[111]
• Two of his residences have been listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places: his childhood Thurber House in Ohio and the Sanford–Curtis–Thurber House in Fairfield County, Connecticut.^[112][113]
• James Thurber Ct. in Falls Church, Virginia, is named after him.^[114]

• The Battle of the Sexes (1959 film) based on "The Catbird Seat"
• Walter Mitty, expression
• List of works by James Thurber

• Bernstein, Burton (1975). Thurber: A Biography. New Yorko: Arbor House. ISBN 0-87795-690-1.
• Cooke, Alistair (August 1, 1956). "James Thurber: In Conversation With Alistair Cooke". The Atlantic. Retrieved April 23, 2023.
• 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.

• Ervolino, Bill (December 17, 1995). "JAMES THURBER'S WORLD AND WELCOME TO IT". The Record (North Jersey). Bergen County, NJ: HighBeam Research. Archived from the original on November 2, 2012. Retrieved April 23, 2023.
• Holmes, Charles S. (1972). The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber. New York: Atheneum.
• Kinney, Harrison (1995). James Thurber: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt & Company. ISBN 0-8050-3966-X.
• Plimpton, George; Steele, Max (1955). "The Art of Fiction, No. 10 : James Thurber". Paris Review. Fall 1955 (10). ISSN 0031-2037. Archived from the original on September 27, 2010. Retrieved April 24, 2023.
• Yagoda, Ben (2000). About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. New York: Scribner. ISBN 0-684-81605-9.

• Official Website of James Thurber – overseen by the Thurber estate and editor Michael J. Rosen
• A Thurber Carnival playlist on YouTube

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

• Pathfinder: James Grover Thurber Archived October 24, 2013, at the Wayback Machine – links portal
• The Last Flower – ballet after an idea by James Thurber; 1975
• Origins of "the Thurber Dog"
• If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox on YouTube – 1982 dramatization of the James Thurber short story

The Ohio State University Libraries Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection

• The James Thurber Papers Archived January 19, 2022, at the Wayback Machine
• Charles S. Holmes Research for The Clocks of Columbus
• The Harrison Kinney Archive for James Thurber: His Life and Times

Works

• Works by James Thurber at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by James Thurber at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• New Yorker magazine digital archive – abstracts of 1,758 Thurber short stories, poems, cartoons and commentaries
• a list of James Thurber books Archived December 24, 2021, at the Wayback Machine
• an alphabetical list of James Thurber short stories
• Helen Thurber, letters and cards, to Geoffrey Woolley — National Library of Wales