A short life of the author
James Thurber (1894–1961) was born in Columbus, Ohio, and became the defining humorist of twentieth-century American letters — a writer and cartoonist whose work for The New Yorker over three decades created a comic world as instantly recognisable as Dickens’s London or Wodehouse’s Blandings. His bewildered male protagonists, his formidable wives, his shaggy dogs, and his deceptively simple drawings constitute one of the great comic visions of the modern era.
Life and Career
Thurber lost the sight in one eye at age six when his brother William accidentally shot him with an arrow during a game of William Tell. The remaining eye deteriorated throughout his life, and he was virtually blind by his fifties — yet he continued to write and draw, producing some of his best work in near-total darkness. The childhood accident shaped his sensibility: the world was always slightly out of focus, slightly menacing, slightly absurd.
He attended Ohio State University but did not graduate, worked as a code clerk at the State Department in Paris, then returned to Columbus as a newspaper reporter. In 1927 he joined The New Yorker, introduced by E.B. White, who became his closest literary friend and collaborator. Their first book together, Is Sex Necessary? (1929), was a parody of the era’s sex manuals.
Thurber became the most prolific contributor in the magazine’s history — stories, casuals, fables, memoirs, cartoons. Harold Ross, the magazine’s founding editor, was simultaneously his champion and his nemesis; Thurber’s The Years with Ross (1959) is the definitive portrait of the magazine’s early years.
His drawings — wobbly, minimal, apparently artless — were initially dismissed as doodles. White rescued them from Thurber’s wastebasket and submitted them to Ross, who published them with some bewilderment. They became as famous as the prose. The Thurber cartoon — a heavy woman, a cringing man, a large dog, a caption of quiet menace — is one of the iconic images of mid-century American culture.
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1939), published in The New Yorker, became one of the most famous short stories in the English language: a mild-mannered man escapes his domineering wife through heroic daydreams. The story’s title entered the language as a common noun.
Thurber grew increasingly irritable and difficult in his blind years, drinking heavily and antagonising friends. He died of pneumonia following a brain tumour on 2 November 1961.
Major Works and Themes
Thurber’s subject is the war between the sexes, the rebellion of the imagination against conformity, and the quiet desperation of American middle-class life — all treated with a lightness of touch that conceals genuine psychological acuity.
My Life and Hard Times (1933) is his masterpiece of comic memoir — a series of increasingly improbable anecdotes about his family in Columbus. The 13 Clocks (1950) is a fairy tale for adults of exquisite wit and verbal inventiveness. The Last Flower (1939) — a “parable in pictures” — is a wordless narrative of civilisation’s cycle of destruction and renewal that is unexpectedly moving.
Thurber and The New Yorker
Thurber’s relationship with The New Yorker is inseparable from the magazine’s identity. He was not merely a contributor but a shaping force: his comic sensibility — urbane, anxious, self-deprecating, alert to the absurdity of respectable life — defined the magazine’s tone as much as Ross’s editorial standards or White’s elegant prose. The magazine’s famous blend of sophistication and vulnerability, its sense that civilised life is a thin crust over chaos, owes as much to Thurber as to any single writer. His fables — collected in Fables for Our Time (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956) — are Aesop rewritten for the age of anxiety, their morals invariably subversive: “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.”
Critical Reception and Legacy
Thurber was immensely popular in his lifetime and is undervalued now — humour ages poorly, and his particular brand of domestic comedy can seem dated. But at his best he is as accomplished a prose stylist as any of his contemporaries. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” remains an indestructible cultural reference, and his influence runs through every American humourist who has written since, from Woody Allen to David Sedaris.
Key Works
- Is Sex Necessary? (1929, with E.B. White)
- The Owl in the Attic (1931)
- My Life and Hard Times (1933)
- The Last Flower (1939)
- The Male Animal (1940, play, with Elliott Nugent)
- My World — and Welcome to It (1942)
- The 13 Clocks (1950)
- The Years with Ross (1959)
Collecting Thurber
Thurber first editions, published primarily by Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row), are moderately collected.
Is Sex Necessary? (1929, Harper & Brothers), the debut collaboration with White, is the most desirable early title. First editions with the dust jacket bring $500–$2,000.
My Life and Hard Times (1933, Harper & Brothers) with Thurber’s own illustrations is highly sought; first editions with jacket bring $300–$1,500.
The most valuable Thurber items are original drawings and cartoons. His New Yorker originals appear at auction and at dealers specialising in illustration art; prices range from $2,000 to $20,000 depending on the image and its publication history. Drawings reproduced as New Yorker covers command the highest premiums.
Signed books are available but not abundant; Thurber’s failing eyesight made signing increasingly difficult in his later years, and late signatures are often wavering and large. Association copies linking him to other New Yorker figures — White, Ross, Dorothy Parker — are particularly prized.