James Thurber Biography Quotes 47 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
James Grover Thurber was born in 1894 in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in a family that encouraged storytelling and quick wit. A childhood accident with an arrow damaged one of his eyes, and lingering complications eventually led to near-total blindness later in life. The early loss of depth perception shaped his sense of the world and sharpened his ear for the absurdities of ordinary conversation. He attended Ohio State University but did not graduate, instead finding his way into journalism and humor through campus writing and the circles of friends he made there, including Elliott Nugent, who would later collaborate with him for the stage.

Early Career
After college, Thurber worked as a reporter and columnist, honing a plainspoken style that smuggled dry, sly jokes into seemingly matter-of-fact prose. He moved between newspaper desks and magazine work, learning to compress scenes into a handful of images and to end with a twist. During these years he married and began to refine the persona of the gentle, baffled observer that would later define his best-known pieces. The newsroom taught him speed; the city taught him timing; and his own reserve suggested a voice where understatement could carry the biggest laugh.

The New Yorker and Emergence as a Humorist
Thurber's career took its decisive turn in New York in the late 1920s, when he joined The New Yorker under editor Harold Ross. In the magazine's bustling offices he shared ideas and deadlines with writers and artists such as E. B. White, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Peter Arno, and Wolcott Gibbs. White, recognizing Thurber's offhand doodles as something more than marginalia, urged him to submit his drawings. The results were a revelation: wobbly-line cartoons that looked effortless, with long-suffering dogs, puzzled men, and imperious women playing out compact dramas of misunderstanding. Side by side with the drawings came the prose, shaggy anecdotes polished to crystalline clarity and stories that enlarged the shabby theater of daily life into fable. With White, he coauthored Is Sex Necessary?, a spoof of pop psychology that showed how his deadpan voice could cut through intellectual fashion. My Life and Hard Times distilled Midwestern memories into sparkling miniature memoir; The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, published later in the magazine, became an emblem of modern daydreaming.

Plays, Books, and Adaptations
Thurber moved easily among forms. He wrote fables that tweaked moralism, collected in volumes that became staples for generations of readers; he wrote children's tales that balanced whimsy with clear-eyed logic; and he teamed with Elliott Nugent to craft The Male Animal, a hit play about academic freedom and domestic comedy. Collections such as The Thurber Carnival brought together cartoons and prose sketches, and a later stage revue, A Thurber Carnival, introduced his pieces to new audiences. Hollywood borrowed from him, notably in the film adaptation of Walter Mitty, and editors like William Shawn at The New Yorker helped shape his late work as his eyesight faded.

Style and Themes
Thurber's comedy rests on a delicate balance of fantasy and exact observation. His sentences are plain but musical, with a rhythm that allows surprises to land softly and then bloom. The cartoons disguise keen architectural intelligence behind apparently casual lines. Much of his work toys with the friction between shy, well-meaning men and formidable, practical women, a recurring pattern that he treated with sympathy as well as unease. He returned often to domestic skirmishes, office landscapes, and the rituals of manners, using understatement to expose private anxieties. His dogs, nostalgic, lugubrious, or simply perplexed, became shorthand for the human condition as he saw it: comic, resilient, and outmatched by events.

Personal Life and Working Methods
Thurber married twice, and the center of his home life provided both subject and support. His first marriage ended, and he later married Helen, who helped manage his work as his eyesight deteriorated. He had one daughter and remained connected to friends from his Ohio years as well as to colleagues at The New Yorker. In the office, he was a generous collaborator who thrived on conversation with E. B. White and on the gruff patience of Harold Ross; after hours, he loved to try out a story aloud, testing where listeners laughed or fell silent. As his vision worsened, he dictated prose and devised methods to keep drawing, relying on memory, large sheets, and the assistance of editors and friends to get the proportions right. The constraint fed his clarity: the fewer lines he could see, the fewer lines he used, and the stronger the image became.

Later Years
By the 1940s and 1950s Thurber struggled with severe eye problems, yet he remained astonishingly productive. He continued to publish essays, fables, and portraits that showed no slackening of wit, and he lectured widely, reading favorites like "The Night the Bed Fell" to audiences who knew the cadences by heart. He reworked older material into new arrangements and kept nudging at contemporary pretensions with the same even tone. Those who worked with him in these years, among them William Shawn, who guided The New Yorker after Ross, helped shape the late collections that consolidated his reputation.

Death and Legacy
Thurber died in New York City in 1961, leaving behind an archive of drawings and prose that redefined American humor. Colleagues at The New Yorker marked his passing with tributes that emphasized both his gentleness and his exacting standards. The word "Mitty" slipped into everyday speech as a synonym for elaborate daydreamer; the "Thurber dog" became an emblem of comic stoicism. His books have remained in print, and his influence can be traced in essayists, cartoonists, and comic novelists who prize economy, surprise, and compassion. In Columbus, his longtime home was preserved as a literary center, and readers return to his work to find, beneath the laughter, a map of modern bewilderment drawn in the fewest possible lines.

Our collection contains 47 quotes who is written by James, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Truth - Art - Love.

Other people realated to James: Ring Lardner (Comedian), Ogden Nash (Poet), Peter De Vries (Novelist), Richard Armour (Poet), Clifton Paul Fadiman (Writer), A. J. Liebling (Journalist), Clifton Fadiman (Writer), Cliff Fadiman (Author), Brendan Gill (Critic)