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james thurber

thurber, james grover

About Me

TO ME, a DOG-LOVER is ONE DOG WHO LOVES ANOTHER DOG
James (Grover) Thurber (1894-1961)
an influence on such diverse contemporary authors as kurt vonnegut and joseph heller, james thurber is generally acknowledged to have been the greatest american humorist since mark twain.
thurber, writer and cartoonist, traded barbs and shared drinks with dorothy parker, ring lardner and robert benchley, as a member of the algonquin roundtable.
his cartoons and short stories appeared regularly in the new yorker magazine, and his short story collections -- such as Thurber's Carnival, My Life and Hard Times, My World and Welcome To It, and Is Sex Necessary? still endear him to readers.
james thurber was partially blinded by a childhood accident - his brother William shot an arrow at him. due to their religious orientation, thurber's parents didn't seek medical care, which may have helped save his eyesight.
unable to play sports, or games, with other children, thurber developed a rich fantasy life (not unlike one of his more famous literary creations - Walter Mitty).
because of poor eyesight, thurber didn't serve in world war I. between 1913 and 1918, he studied at ohio state university. later, he worked as a code cleark in washington dc.
in 1922, james thurber married althea adams. their troubled marraige ended in 1935.
in 1926, thurber migrated to new york. already a reporter for the evening post, in 1927 he began writing for the new yorker magazine - which had begun publication in 1925.
new yorker editor and owner Ross, reportedly said to him: "everybody thinks he knows English, but nobody does. I think it's because of the goddamn women and schoolteachers." in 1959, thurber would parody his years with ross in a book entitled My Years With Ross.
james thurber's first book, Is Sex Necessary?, was printed in 1929. it was co-written with new yorker staff writer eb white.
his later works included the 13 clocks, and the wonderful O, which were books for children, and which enjoyed enormous popularity.
thurber would marry a second time, to helen thurber, and have child, a daughter named rosemary.

My Interests

INTERESTS JAMES THURBER
selected works
IS SEX NECESSARY?, 1929 (james thurber with eb white)
THE OWL IN THE ATTIC AND OTHER PERPLEXITIES, 1931
THE SEAL IN THE BEDROOM, 1932
MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES, 1933
THE MIDDLE AGED MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE, 1935
LET YOUR MIND ALONE!, 1937
THE LAST FLOWER, 1939
THE MALE ANIMAL, 1939 (cowriter with elliot nugent)
FABLES FOR OUR TIME, 1940
MY WORLD - AND WELCOME TO IT, 1942 - includes the story 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' -film 1947, dir.
Norman Z. McLeod, story by James Thurber, starring Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo, Boris Karloff
MEN, WOMEN, AND DOGS, 1943

MANY MOONS, 1943
THE WHITE DEER, 1945
THE THURBER CARNIVAL, 1945
THE BEAST IN ME AND OTHER ANIMALS, 1948
THE 13 CLOCKS, 1950
THE THURBER ALBUM, 1952
THURBER COUNTRY, 1953
THURBER DOGS, 1955
A THURBER GARLAND, 1955
FURTHER FABLES FOR OUR TIME, 1956
THE WONDERFUL O, 1957
ALARMS AND DIVERSIONS, 1957
LIFE WITH ROSS / THE YEARS WITH ROSS, 1959
LANTERNS AND LANCES, 1961
CREDOS AND CURIOS, 1962
VINTAGE THURBER, 1963 (2 vols.)
THURBER AND COMPANY, 1966
SELECTED LETTERS, 1981
JAMES THURBER: WRITINGS AND DRAWINGS, 1996 (ed. by Garrison Keillor)
THE THURBER LETTERS: THE WIT, WISDOM AND SURPRISING LIFE OF JAMES THURBER, 2003 (edited by harrison kinney and rosemary thurber - rosemary a. thurber is james thurber's only daughter)

JAMES THURBER QUOTES:
James Thurber - I hate women because they always know where things are.
James Thurber - I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
James Thurber - I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.
James Thurber - It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.
James Thurber - It's better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
James Thurber -Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
James Thurber - The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber -The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people--that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
James Thurber - There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
James Thurber (sounding suprinsingly like yogi berra) - Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
James Thurber - I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

James Thurber, in Edward R. Murrow television interview - Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.
James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (1933) Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
James Thurber, New Yorker cartoon caption, June 5, 1937 - You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
James Thurber, New Yorker, Apr. 29, 1939 "The Bear Who Let It Alone" You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
James Thurber, New Yorker, Apr. 29, 1939 "The Owl who was God" Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
James Thurber, New Yorker, Feb. 18, 1939 "The Shrike and the Chipmunks" There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
James Thurber, New Yorker, Feb. 4, 1939, "The Fairly Intelligent Fly" - A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
James Thurber -A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
James Thurber -All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
James Thurber - All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
James Thurber - Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
James Thurber -But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
James Thurber - Discussion in America means dissent.
James Thurber -From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. "After dinner, the men moved into the living room." I explained to the professor that this was Rose' way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.
James Thurber - He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
James Thurber -Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
James ThurberHundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.
James Thurber - I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
James Thurber - I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.
James Thurber - If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
James Thurber - It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.
James Thurber - It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.
James Thurber - It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
James Thurber - Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
James Thurber -Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
James Thurber - My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
James Thurber - My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
James Thurber -No other editor has ever been lost and saved so often in the course of a working week. When his heart leaped up, it leaped a long way, because it started from so far down, and its commutings over the years from the depths to the heights made Ross a specialist in appreciation.
James Thurber - Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
James Thurber - Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.
James Thurber - Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed - but never the husband).
James Thurber - Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.
James Thurber - The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.
James Thurber -The story of Harold Ross, the New Yorker and me is a mere footnote to the story of our time, and we might as well face the truth that to researchers of the future, poking about among the ruins of time, we shall all be tiny glitters. But then, so are diamonds.
James Thurber -Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
James Thurber -We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
James Thurber - Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
James Thurber - Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.
James Thurber - The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.
James Thurber -The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. - The 13 Clocks (ch. 1) [Books (First Lines)]
James Thurber -The train was twenty minutes late, we found out when we bought our tickets, so we sat down on a bench in the little waiting room of the Cornwall Bridge station. It was too hot outside in the sun. This midsummer Saturday had got off to a sulky start, and now, at three in the afternoon, it sat, sticky and restive, in our laps. - The Thurber Carnival [Books (First Lines)] BUY VARYING HARE USED BOOK
James Thurber -If you should walk and wind and wander far enough on one of those afternoons in April when smoke goes down instead of up, and nearby things sound far away and far things near, you are more than likely to come at last to the enchanted forest that lies between the Moonstone Mines and Centaurs Mountain. - The White Deer [Books (First Lines)]
James Thurber -Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act. James Thurber
James Thurber -The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
James Thurber -From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing. James Thurber
James Thurber - The most dangerous food is wedding cake. James Thurber
James Thurber - Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
James Thurber -I have always thought of a dog lover as a dog that was in love with another dog.
James Thurber -No man who has wrestled with a self-adjusting card table can ever be quite the man he once was.
James Thurber - Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
James Thurber - Americans want to go to heaven without dying.
James Thurber - Fables for Our Time, 1940 - And the little girl had approached the bed no nearer than thirty feet when she pulled out a pistol and shot the wolf dead; for even in a cap and nightgown a wolf looks no more like your grandmother than Calvin Coolidge looks like the Metro-Goldwyn lion. Moral: Little girls are not so easy to fool nowadays as they used to be.

I'd like to meet:

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