James Grover Thurber
(1894-1961)
One of the foremost and most celebrated American humourists of the twentieth century, James Thurber rose to prominence as a writer and cartoonist in the early years of The New Yorker. The simple line of his cartoons, often portraying a wife’s frustration with their meek husband, became an iconic feature of The New Yorker, and with the humour and wit of his writings in stories such as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Dog That Bit People, James Thurber developed into a distinguished author, playwright and one of the greatest of the modern American storytellers.
James Grover Thurber was born on 8 December 1894 in Columbus, Ohio, to Charles Leander Thurber and Mary Agnes (neé Fisher). He was the middle child with an older brother, William, and a younger brother, Robert. During Thurber’s childhood, the family was forced to move often on account of his father’s frequent job changes as a civil clerk. When James Thurber was seven years old, the family was living near Washington D.C.
while Charles Thurber was working as a secretary for a congressman. While playing in the garden with his two brothers, James Thurber was accidently shot with a toy arrow, permanently blinding him in his left eye. The eye was replaced with a prosthetic and he would be plagued with issues with sight in his remaining eye for the rest of his life. Shortly thereafter, the family returned to Columbus and James Thurber attended Sullivant Elementary and Douglas Junior High School, before graduating from East High School in 1913. He attended Ohio State University from 1913 to 1918, where he wrote for the college paper, The Lantern, and was editor-in-chief of the magazine The Sun Dial. He left OSU without a degree as his partial blindness prevented him from completing a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program required for graduation.
After college, James Thurber worked variously as a clerk in Washington D.C and at the American Embassy in Paris, before returning to Columbus in 1930 as a reporter for The Columbus Dispatch. During this time back in Columbus, he met his first wife, Althea Adams, and they were married in 1922. In 1925, the couple moved to Paris, where Thurber worked on the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. They returned to the US the following year, moving to New York where Thurber took up a role as a reporter for the Evening Post. While in New York, the author E. B. White, with whom Thurber would collaborate on this first book, Is Sex Necessary (1929), introduced him to Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, which had begun in 1927. Thurber joined the editorial staff of The New Yorker in 1929 as a writer and, from 1931 began drawing cartoons too. Though he left The New Yorker’s staff in 1935, he would continue to contribute drawings and cartoons for years despite his deteriorating eyesight. Some of this most famous tales and cartoons includes ‘The Night the Ghost Got In,’ ‘The Dog That Bit People,’ and ‘The Unicorn in the Garden.’ A great dog-lover, Thurber’s drawings regularly featured dogs and these became some of his most beloved images.
In 1939, he published what is regarded as one of his most famous works, the short story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. In 1947, it was adapted into a movie starring Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo and Boris Karloff (it would later be remade in 2013), and is considered today as one of the greatest short stories of the twentieth century. In 1940, along with a friend from college, James Thurber wrote a stage play called The Male Animal. The show became a Broadway hit and in 1942 was adapted into a movie starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. In 1945, he wrote The Thurber Carnival, which was adapted into a play, A Thurber Carnival, in 1960. Thurber portrayed himself in 88 performances and won a Tony award for the adapted script.
Though the final twenty years of his life featured consistent professional success – he wrote over a dozen more books, such as My World and Welcome To It (1942), Many Moons (1943), Further Fables for Our Time (1956) and The Years with Ross (1959) – they were marked by his rapidly diminishing eyesight. Thurber used a magnifying device and large sheets of paper to continue drawing cartoons until, in 1951, his almost total blindness forced him to stop completely. His later writings were all conceived in his head and then dictated. In 1961, he suffered a blood clot on his brain and despite a successful surgery, he died due to complications from pneumonia on 2 November 1961. He was survived by his second wife, Helen (neé Wismer), whom he had married in 1935, shortly after his divorce from Althea. He had one daughter, Rosemary Thurber, from his first marriage.
