James Grove Thurber

James Grove Thurber (1894-1961) was an American writer and artist. One of the most popular humorists of his time, Thurber celebrated in stories and in cartoons the comic frustrations of eccentric and statureless people.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, James Thurber attended Ohio State University—though he never took a degree—and worked for some years in Ohio as a journalist. He moved to New York in 1926. In 1927 he met writer E. B. White and was taken onto the staff of the New Yorker magazine. In collaboration with White he produced his first book, Is Sex Necessary? (1929). By 1931 his first cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker seals, sea lions, strange tigers, harried men, determined women, and, most of all, dogs. Thurber's dogs became something like a national comic institution, and they dotted the pages of a whole series of books. His book The Seal in the Bedroom appeared in 1932, followed in 1933 by My Life and Hard Times. He published The Middle-aged Man on the Flying Trapeze in 1935, and by 1937, when he published Let Your Mind Alone!, he had become so successful that he left his position on the New Yorker staff to free-lance and to travel abroad.

The Last Flower appeared in 1939; that year Thurber collaborated with White on a play, The Male Animal. The play was a hit when it opened in 1940. But this was also the year that Thurber was forced to undergo a series of eye operations for cataract and trachoma. His eyesight grew steadily worse until, in 1951, it was so weak that he did his last drawing. He spent the last decade of his life in blindness.

The last 20 years of Thurber's life were filled with material and professional success in spite of his handicap. He published at least 14 more books, including The Thurber Carnival (1945), Thurber Country (1953), and the extremely popular account of the life of the New Yorker editer Harold Ross, The Years with Ross (1959). A number of his stories were made into movies, including "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1947).

Thurber's comic world was peopled by his curious animals, who watched in resignation as predatory women ran to ground apparently spineless men. But beneath their docile exteriors, Thurber's men dreamed of wild escape and epic adventure and, so, in their way won out in the battle of the sexes.

Further Reading

Robert E. Morsberger, James Thurber (1964), is useful for biographical facts, and Richard C. Tobias discusses Thurber's literary significance in The Art of James Thurber (1969). See also Edwin T. Bowden, James Thurber: A Bibliography (1968). For background see Walter Blair, Horse Sense in American Humor (1942), and Malcolm Cowley, The Literary Situation (1954). □

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.

James Thurber 1894–1961, American humorist, b. Columbus, Ohio, studied at Ohio State Univ. After working on various newspapers he served on the staff of the New Yorker from 1927 to 1933 and was later a principal contributor to the magazine, considerably influencing its tone through his various drawings, stories, and anecdotes of his misadventures. Beneath the vague outlines of Thurber's cartoons and the wistful and ironic improbabilities of his writings—often dealing with incidents and characters from his Midwestern childhood or with the vexed relationship between the sexes—there is a deep psychological insight that sets him apart from most 20th-century humorists.

With E. B. White he wrote and illustrated Is Sex Necessary? (1929), a satire of books on popular psychoanalysis. The Male Animal (1940), a play he wrote with Elliott Nugent, satirizes collegiate life. Collections of his drawings and writings include The Owl in the Attic (1931), The Seal in the Bedroom (1932), My Life and Hard Times (1933), Fables for Our Time (1940), The Thurber Carnival (1945), Thurber Country (1953), Thurber's Dogs (1955), The Wonderful O (1957), and Credos and Curios (1962). Among his other works are The Thirteen Clocks (1950), a children's book, and The Years with Ross (1959), a memoir of his days with the New Yorker. Thurber's later career was hampered by his growing blindness.

Bibliography: See H. Thurber and E. Weeks, ed., Selected Letters of James Thurber (1981) and H. Kinney and R. A. Thurber, ed., The Thurber Letters (2003); biographies by C. S. Holmes (1972), B. Bernstein (1975, repr. 1985), R. E. Long (1988), N. A. Grauer (1994), and H. Kinney (1995).

Thurber, James Grover (1894–1961) US humorist and cartoonist. From 1923, he was a regular contributor of essays, short stories and cartoons to the New Yorker. Collections of Thurber's essays and stories include My Life and Hard Times (1933), and My World and Welcome to It (1942), which includes his best-known short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1932).

Thurber, James Grover (1894–1961), American humorist, many of whose essays, stories, and sketches appeared in the New Yorker, including one of his best-known short stories, ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ (1932), which describes the colourful escapist fantasies of a docile husband.

Thurber, James. See Male Animal, The.