James Thurber

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James Thurber

Born: December 8, 1894
Columbus, Ohio
Died: November 2, 1961
Occupation(s): humorist
Nationality: American
Writing period: 1929 to 1961
Genre(s): short stories, cartoons, essays
Subject(s): humor, language

James Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894–November 2, 1961) was a U.S. humorist and cartoonist. Thurber was best known for his contributions (both cartoons and short stories) to The New Yorker magazine.

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[edit] Biography

Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio to Charles L. Thurber and Mary Agnes (Mame) Fisher Thurber. Both of his parents greatly influenced his work. His father, a sporadically employed clerk and minor politician who dreamed of being a lawyer or an actor, is said to have been the inspiration for the small, timid protagonist typical of many of his stories. Thurber describes his mother as a "born comedienne" and "one of the finest comic talents I think I have ever known." She was a practical joker, on one occasion pretending to be crippled and attending a faith healer revival, only to jump up and proclaim herself healed.

Thurber had two brothers, William and Robert. Once, while playing a game of William Tell, his brother William shot James in the eye with an arrow. Because of the lack of medical technology, Thurber lost his eye. This injury would later cause him to be almost entirely blind. During his childhood he was unable to participate in sports and activities because of his injury, and instead developed a creative imagination, which he shared in his writings.

From 1913 to 1917, Thurber attended The Ohio State University, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. He never graduated from the University because his poor eyesight prevented him from taking a mandatory ROTC course. He was posthumously awarded a degree.

From 1918 to 1920, at the close of World War I, Thurber worked as a code clerk for the Department of State, first in Washington, D.C. and then at the American Embassy in Paris, France. After this Thurber returned to Columbus, where he began his writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch from 1921 to 1924. During part of this time, he reviewed current books, films, and plays in a weekly column called "Credos and Curios," a title that would later be given to a posthumous collection of his work. Thurber also returned to Paris in this period, where he wrote for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.

In 1925, he moved to New York City, getting a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Post. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1927 as an editor with the help of his friend and fellow New Yorker contributor, E.B. White. His career as a cartoonist began in 1930 when White found some of Thurber's drawings in a trash can and submitted them for publication. Thurber would contribute both his writings and his drawings to The New Yorker until the 1950's.

Thurber was married twice. In 1922, Thurber married Althea Adams. The marriage was troubled and ended in divorce in 1935. Adams gave Thurber his only child, his daughter Rosemary. Thurber remarried in 1935 to Helen Wismer. His second marriage lasted until he died in 1961 due to complications from pneumonia, which followed upon a stroke suffered at his home.

The Maragni, Cavanaugh, Mostafa, and Piacentino families are living relatives of James Thurber, some of whom try to continue on his writing legacy. The only living Thurbers known are Harry Thurber and James Thurber Jr.

[edit] Career

Thurber worked hard in the 1920's, both in the U.S.A. and in France, to establish himself as a professional writer. However, unique among major American literary figures, he became equally well known for his simple, surrealistic drawings and cartoons. Both his skills were helped along by the support of, and collaboration with, fellow New Yorker staff member E. B. White. White insisted that Thurber's sketches could stand on their own as artistic expressions — and Thurber would go on to draw six covers and numerous classic illustrations for the New Yorker.

While able to sketch out his cartoons in the usual fashion in the 1920's and 1930's, his failing eyesight later required him to draw them on very large sheets of paper using a thick black crayon (also, on black paper using white chalk, from which they were photographed and the colors reversed for publication). Regardless of method, his cartoons became as notable as his writings; they possessed an eerie, wobbly feel that seems to mirror Thurber's idiosyncratic view on life. He once wrote that people said it looked like he drew them under water. (Dorothy Parker, contemporary and friend of Thurber, referred to his cartoons as having the "semblance of unbaked cookies.")

Many of his short stories are humorous fictional memoirs from his life, but he also wrote darker material. "The Dog Who Bit People" and "The Night the Bed Fell" are among his best short stories; they can be found in My Life and Hard Times, the creative mix of autobiography and fiction which was his 'break-out' book. Also notable, and often anthologized, are "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", "The Catbird Seat," "The Greatest Man in the World" and "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomatox", which can be found in The Thurber Carnival. 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.

Thurber teamed with college schoolmate (and actor/director) Elliot Nugent to write a major Broadway hit comic drama of the late 1930's, "The Male Animal" (made into a film in 1942, starring Henry Fonda, Olivia de Haviland, and Jack Carson). In 1947 Danny Kaye played the title character in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a film that had little to do with the story and which Thurber hated.

Near the end of his life, Thurber finally was able to fulfill his long-standing desire to be on the professional stage by playing himself in a few performances of the revue A Thurber Carnival, made up of various acted-out stories and cartoon captions. Thurber won a special Tony Award for the adapted script of the "Carnival."

A network television show based on Thurber's writings and life entitled My World and Welcome to It was broadcast from 1969 to 1970, starring William Windom as the Thurber figure. Windom went on to perform Thurber's work in his one-man stage performances. The animation of Thurber's cartoons on this show led to the 1972 Jack Lemmon film The War Between Men And Women, which concludes with a fine animated rendering of Thurber's classic anti-war work "The Last Flower."

Thurber died at age 66 in New York City. An annual award, The Thurber Prize, begun in 1966, honors outstanding examples of American humor.

[edit] Thurber's brain

The neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran discusses the effect of damaged vision on Thurber's imagination in Phantoms in the Brain (cowritten with Sandra Blakeslee, 1998, ISBN 0-688-17217-2). He proposes that Thurber had Charles Bonnet syndrome, a mental condition which causes certain victims of eyesight damage to see highly vivid hallucinations. In his essay "The Admiral on the Wheel", Thurber reported seeing hallucinations, including a gay old lady with a grey parasol walking right through the side of a truck, and bridges rising lazily into the air, like balloons.

Proffered diagnoses from neurosurgeons aside, Thurber may have himself supplied the reasons for such sights in the essay itself. He opens it with: When the colored maid stepped on my glasses the other morning,... After describing these and other sights while en route to New Jersey, he then states: I suppose you have to have just the right proportion of sight to encounter such phenomena:... With three-fifths vision or better, I suppose ... the very gay old lady, a garbage man with a garbage can on his back, ... the floating bridges smoke from tugs, hanging in the air. ... The kingdom of the partly blind is a little like Oz, a little like Wonderland, a little like Poictesme. Anything you can think of, and a lot you never would think of, can happen there.

[edit] Quotations

  • "If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons."
  • "Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility."
  • "Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness."
  • "It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."
  • "You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
  • "One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough."
  • "Don't get it right; get it written."
  • "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be."
  • "There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else."
  • "Never allow a nervous female to have access to a pistol, no matter what you're wearing."
  • "You might as well fall flat on your face as lean too far backward"
  • From My Life And Hard Times, referring to a fellow Ohio State student and football star: "In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter."
  • Thurber is sometimes misquoted as the source of the quip, "A woman's place is in the wrong." In fact, Thurber merely repeated the quotation in a speech and rather criticized it, saying: "Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right." He went on to clarify his conception of women by saying, "If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on."
  • "Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.”

[edit] Books

  • Is Sex Necessary? or, Why You Feel The Way You Do (spoof of sexual psychology manuals, with E. B. White), 1929, 75th anniv. edition (2004) with foreword by John Updike, ISBN 0-06-073314-4
  • The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities, 1931
  • The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments, 1932
  • My Life and Hard Times, 1933 ISBN 0-06-093308-9
  • The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, 1935
  • Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More Or Less Inspirational Pieces, 1937
  • The Last Flower, 1939
  • The Male Animal (stage play), 1939 (with Elliot Nugent)
  • Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated, 1940 ISBN 0-06-090999-4
  • My World--and Welcome To It, 1942 ISBN 0-15-662344-7
  • Many Moons, (children) 1943
  • Men, Women, and Dogs, 1943
  • The Great Quillow, (children) 1944
  • The Thurber Carnival (anthology), 1945, ISBN 0-06-093287-2
  • The White Deer, (children) 1945
  • The Beast in Me and Other Animals, 1948 ISBN 0-15-610850-X
  • The 13 Clocks, (children) 1950
  • The Thurber Album, 1952
  • Thurber Country, 1953
  • Thurber's Dogs, 1955
  • Further Fables For Our Time, 1956
  • The Wonderful O, (children) 1957
  • Alarms and Diversions (anthology), 1957
  • The Years With Ross, 1959 ISBN 0-06-095971-1
  • A Thurber Carnival (stage play), 1960
  • Lanterns and Lances, 1961

Posthumous Collections:

  • Credos and Curios, 1962
  • Thurber & Company, 1966 (ed. Helen W. Thurber)
  • Selected Letters of James Thurber, 1981 (ed. Helen W. Thurber & Edward Weeks)
  • Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself, 1989 (ed. Michael J. Rosen)
  • Thurber On Crime, 1991 (ed. Robert Lopresti)
  • People Have More Fun Than Anybody: A Centennial Celebration of Drawings and Writings by James Thurber, 1994 (ed. Michael J. Rosen)
  • James Thurber: Writings and Drawings, 1996, (ed. Garrison Keillor), Library of America, ISBN 1-883011-22-1
  • The Dog Department: James Thurber on Hounds, Scotties, and Talking Poodles, 2001 (ed. Michael J. Rosen)
  • The Thurber Letters, 2002 (ed. Harrison Kinney, with Rosemary A. Thurber)

[edit] Biographies of Thurber

  • Burton Bernstein Thurber (1975); William Morrow & Co (May, 1996) ISBN 0-688-14772-0
  • Neil A. Grauer Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber (1994); University of Nebraska Press; Reprint edition (August, 1995) ISBN 0-8032-7056-9
  • Harrison Kinney James Thurber: His Life and Times (1995); Henry Holt & Co ISBN 0-8050-3966-X

[edit] Literature review

  • The Clocks Of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber by Charles S. Holmes (1972). Atheneum ASIN B0006C4G3O; Secker & Warburg, May 1973, ISBN 0-436-20080-5

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] References

  • [1] Authors' Calendar
  • [2] Thurber house
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