Thurber, James (Grover)

Thurber, James [Grover] (1894–1961), Ohio‐born humorous writer and artist, in 1927 began his lifelong association with The New Yorker, in which most of his work first appeared. Of the journal and its editor, Harold Ross, he wrote a personal history, The Years with Ross (1959). His essays, sketches, fables, stories, parables, and reminiscences, illustrated by his distinctive and fluid drawings, include Is Sex Necessary? (1929), written with E.B. White, satirizing pseudo‐scientific sex manuals; The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities (1931); The Seal in the Bedroom & Other Predicaments (1932); My Life and Hard Times (1933), amusing recollections; The Middle‐Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935); Let Your Mind Alone! (1937), satirizing inspirational books and popularizations of psychology; The Last Flower (1939), an ironic parable of modern war; Fables for Our Time, and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940); My World—and Welcome to It (1942), essays, sketches, and stories, including the well‐known tale “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”; Thurber's Men, Women, and Dogs (1943), drawings; The Thurber Carnival (1945); The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948); Thurber Country (1953); Further Fables for Our Time (1956); Alarms and Diversions (1957); Lanterns & Lances (1961), essays that are final examples of light and shafts cast by the author; and Credos and Curios (1962), a posthumous collection of stories and sketches. Many Moons (1943), The Great Quillow (1944), The White Deer (1945), The 13 Clocks (1950), and The Wonderful O (1957) are fantasies for children. With Elliott Nugent he wrote The Male Animal (1940), a comedy dealing with the rivalry between an English professor and an ex‐football player for the love of the professor's wife.

Thurber's humorous prose and drawings are never raucous, for, as he said, “the little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy,” in keeping with his view that “humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.” His fantastic people and animals move with sad persistence through incredible upsets, and are all misshapen and repressed, products of a malignant fate which they stoically survive or combat. Across the puzzling scene that is surveyed by resigned dogs move predatory women at war with docile men who, caught by life's conventions, quietly dream of escape and deeds of derring‐do.