James Thurber Add a review

James Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894 – November 2, 1961) was an American cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist, and playwright. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, and attended Ohio State University, leaving in 1918 without graduating. He spent over a year in Paris, working for the US State Department as a code clerk, and on his return to Columbus in 1920 was hired as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. He married his first wife, Althea Adams, in 1922. Thurber was hired by The New Yorker in early 1927, and soon became a prolific and popular contributor.

With E. B. White he wrote Is Sex Necessary?, a parody of serious psychological books about sex. It included many illustrations by Thurber, and the popularity of these convinced The New Yorker to start printing his cartoons. Over the 1930s several books of his writings and cartoons appeared, including My Life and Hard Times, a collection of reminiscences about Thurber's childhood in Columbus that is often considered his finest work. In 1935 he and Althea divorced, and he immediately remarried, to Helen Wismer. In 1938 he and a college friend, Elliott Nugent, wrote a play, The Male Animal, which had a successful run in 1940 and 1941 and was later made into a film.

Thurber had lost an eye in childhood, and by the late 1930s he was starting to lose vision in his remaining eye. Operations in the early 1940s were unable to save his sight, and he became almost completely blind. He was able to draw until the mid-1940s, and continued to be a productive writer, with The Thurber Carnival, his most successful book, appearing in 1945. In the early 1950s he had thyroid problems that led to emotional instability, which was not brought under control for a couple of years. Later successes included Further Fables for Our Time, a collection of fables most of which could be read as political commentary, which appeared during the McCarthy "red scare" era, and a stage version of The Thurber Carnival, in which he acted in for several months in 1959.

He suffered from a series of undiagnosed small strokes during the last year of his life, and died on November 2, 1961, in Manhattan. His ashes are buried in Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus.