James Thurber Biography and List of Works

American writer and cartoonist, whose best-known character is perhaps Walter Mitty. Turber is primarily interested in the small events of human life, and the frustrations of the modern world. His stories have influenced later writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. Thurber is generally acknowledged as the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain (1835-1910).

"Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead."
(from Fables for Our Time, 1940)

James Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio. His father was Charles Leander (later surnamed Lincoln), a minor politician. Mary Thurber, his mother, was a strong-minded woman and a practical joker, whom her son depicted in his autobiographical stories MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES (1933). Thurber's father, who had dreams of being an actor or lawyer, was said to have been the basis for the typical small, slight man of Thurber's stories. Young James was partially blinded by a childhood accident - his brother William shot an arrow at him. When he was unable to participate in games and sports with other children, he developed a rich fantasy life, which would serve to inspire his later fiction. Thurber began writing at secondary school. Between 1913 and 1918 he studied at Ohio State University. He worked as a code clerk in Washington, DC, and at the US embassy in Paris. In the early 1920s he worked as a journalist for several newspapers, and also lived in Paris writing for Chicago Tribune and trying to further his writing career.

'"What was the matter with that one policeman? mother asked, after they had gone. "Grandfather shot him," I said. "What for?" she demanded. I told her he was a deserter. "Of all things!" said mother. "He was such a nice-looking young man."'
(from 'The Night the Ghost Got In', in My Life and Hard Times, 1933)

In 1926 Thurber went to New York City, where he was a reporter for the Evening Post. Next year he joined Harold Ross's newly established The New Yorker, where he found his clear, concise prose style and where fifteen of his books first appeared. Thurber's wry humour shows great sensitivity to human fears and follies. Later Thurber published his memoirs from this period under the title THE YEARS WITH ROSS (1959). "Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity."

Thurber's first book, IS SEX NECESSARY? appeared in 1929. It was jointly written with the fellow New Yorker staffer E.B. White. The book ridicules European psychoanalysis, including the work of Freud, and other theorists who attempted to reduce sex to a scientifically understandable phenomenon. The book presents Thurber's drawings on the subject, and instantly established him as a true comedic talent.

In the 1950s Thurber published modern fairy tales for children, THE 13 CLOCKS (1950) and THE WONDERFUL O (1957), which both gained a huge success. Thurber's children's tales display a cynical undercurrent, and at times show a great deal of bitterness. Thurber left the staff of the New Yorker in 1933, but had remained a contributor. His eyesight became worse in the 1940s, and by the 1950s his blindness was nearly total. Thurber continued to compose stories in his head, and played himself in 88 performances of the play A Thurber Carnival. He received a Litt.D. in 1950 from Kenyon College, one from Yale in 1953, and an L.H.D. (honorary) from Williams College in 1951.

Thurber was married twice, and had one daughter. In later years Thurber lived with his wife Helen Wismer at West Cornwall, Connecticut. Her devoted nursing enabled him to maintain his literary production and humour to the end. Thurber died of pneumonia on November 2, 1961, in New York.

"One night nearly thirty years ago, in a legendary New York boîte de nuit et des arts called Tony's, I was taking part in a running literary gun fight that had begun with a derogatory or complimentary remark somebody made about something, when one of the participants, former Pinkerton man Dashiell Hammett, whose The Maltese Falcon had come out a couple of years before, suddenly startled us all by announcing that his writing had been influenced by Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove. Nothing surprises me any more, but I couldn't have been more surprised than if Humphrey Bogart, another frequenter of that old salon of wassail and debate, had proclaimed that his acting bore deep impress of the histrionic art of Maude Adams."
(from 'The Wings of Henry James', in Lanterns and Lances, 1961)

During his career Thurber experimented with many styles of writing. He said that the Midwestern atmosphere of Columbus, movies, and comic strips influenced his ideas. On several occasions his poor eyesight was the basis for misunderstandings. Thurber also was inspired by confusion with language as in the story 'The Black Magic of Barney Haller' (1935), where his handyman Haller's gibberish leads Thurber into a linguistic Wonderland. On the other hand his feminist readers have not swallowed Thurber's themes of war between men and women.

Thurber's 1947 story 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' was taken up by psychologist and 'Walter Mitty Syndrome' was put forward in a British medical journal as a clinical condition, which manifested itself in compulsive fantasising. The title character is a meek, mild-mannered, henpecked husband who escapes his mundane everyday existence via heroic fantasies.

In addition to his fame as a writer, Thurber was a highly respected artist and cartoonist. His surreal, minimalist sketches were regular features of the New Yorker, where they became prototypes of his later sophisticated cartoons.

For further reading: James Thurber by R.E. Morsberger (1964); The Art of James Thurber by R.C. Tobias (1969); The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber by C.S. Holmes (1972); Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Charles S. Holmes (1974); Thurber: A Biography by Burton Bernstein (1975); Thurber's Anatomy of Confusion by C.M. Kenney (1984); Conversations with James Thurber, ed by Thomas Fensch (1989); Remember Laughter by Nell A. Grauer (1994); James Thurber: His Life and Times by Harrison Kinney (1995) - Note: Truman Capote also worked at the New Yorker, but according to his reminiscences he was a general dogsbody who helped Thurber to and from meetings, or escorted Thurber to his trysts with one of the magazine's secretaries.

IS SEX NECESSARY, (1929)