James Thurber
(1894–1961)

James Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 1894. The son of a gentle, worried father and a lively, dramatic mother, James, or "Jamie," as his family called him, was the second of three rambunctious brothers.

One summer afternoon when Thurber was six, he and his brothers were playing a game of William Tell with homemade bows and arrows. James was accidentally shot with an arrow in his left eye, which left him blind in that eye. Unfortunately, an infection spread to his right eye, and by the time Thurber reached middle age, he would be nearly blind.

After his injury, Thurber wasn't able to take part in games and sports. He became a shy, awkward boy who was teased and bullied. Though he was often lonely, he developed a rich imaginative life that would serve him well as a writer.

Thurber blossomed in his high school years and was recognized for his talent in writing and drawing. In his senior year, he was elected class president. Thurber enrolled at Ohio State University in 1913. He worked on the university's newspaper and humor magazine, and wrote plays and songs for the university's dramatic club. Still, he felt dissatisfied with college life and dropped out in 1918.

The United States was fighting World War I at the time, and many of Thurber's friends were enlisting in the military. Thurber was ineligible for combat duty because of his eye injury, so, instead, he took a job writing codes for the military.

Thurber returned home to Columbus in 1920 and worked as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, where he had his own column. Moving to France in 1925, Thurber got a job at the Paris bureau, and later at the Riviera edition, of the Chicago Tribune. In 1926 the writer relocated yet again, this time to New York City, where he was a reporter for the New York Evening Post.

In 1927, Thurber met writer E. B. White at a party. White offered to introduce him to Harold Ross, the editor of a struggling new magazine called The New Yorker, which specialized in witty, up-to-date humor. After his interview with Ross, Thurber was hired as managing editor of the magazine.

Thurber's style and interests were a perfect fit for The New Yorker, and he was a regular contributor to the magazine for the rest of his life, playing an important role in shaping and refining its distinct literary voice. It was also The New Yorker that launched Thurber's career as a cartoonist, publishing his quirky but appealing drawings of people and animals.

In 1929, Thurber published his first book, followed by two other essay collections, The Owl in the Attic (1931) and The Seal in the Bedroom (1932). In 1933, came My Life and Hard Times, a collection of humorous autobiographical essays, which included "The Night the Bed Fell" and "The Night the Ghost Got In." The book won Thurber instant critical admiration, and many of the essays in it have become classics of American literature. Thurber was now achieving the literary success he had dreamed of, but this period was saddened by a divorce from his first wife in 1935.

Thurber remarried, this time to a magazine editor named Helen Wismer. This marriage lasted for 26 years, and his wife eventually became Thurber's business manager, editor, and (as he playfully called her) his "seeing-eye wife." Her love and care helped Thurber through difficult years in which he managed to publish another 20 books of essays and stories, despite his declining eyesight and other health problems. In these years, Thurber also wrote several plays and children's books. Despite being declared legally blind, Thurber continued drawing cartoons, using a device called a Zeiss loupe, a magnifying device like those that jewelers use to examine diamonds.

However, Thurber's eyesight and health continued to deteriorate. In October of 1961 he collapsed after attending a play. Despite surgery, James Thurber died of respiratory failure on November 2, 1961.

In the 1920s, New York held a special appeal for aspiring writers seeking fame and fortune. Magazines such as Vanity Fair and The Smart Set were luring bright young men and women to the big city. These writers were creating a new kind of urban humor–modern, witty, sophisticated, and critical. Some of these writers regularly met for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel to discuss the issues of the day and trade humorous quips and insults. Among the members of what was called the Algonquin Roundtable were Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Ring Lardner, and Harold Ross.

In 1925 Ross decided to start his own magazine to reflect the unique sensibility of New York. Gradually The New Yorker began publishing the best of the Algonquin writers, as well as a new crop of humorists and cartoonists that gave the magazine its distinctive flavor. These included James Thurber, E.B. White, S.J. Perelman, Clarence Day, Ogden Nash, Phyllis McGinley, Peter Arno, William Steig, and Charles Addams (creator of the Addams Family).

In later decades, the editors of the magazine discovered and cultivated the work of many important twentieth century writers, such as J. D. Salinger, John Updike, and John Cheever. To be published in The New Yorker became a hallmark of literary success.

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