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 (OSU), 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 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.
James Grover Thurber (known as "Jamie" to his family) was born in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 1894. His father, Charles Leander Thurber, was a clerk working for the Ohio Republican Party at the time James was born; his wife, Mary Agnes Fisher (known as "Mame") was from a wealthy local family. James was the middle son of three; his older brother, William, was born in 1893, and Robert was born in 1896. In April 1902 Charles moved the family to Washington D.C., and the Thurbers rented a house in Falls Church, Virginia that August. One Sunday while they were in Falls Church, James and William were playing with a bow and arrow in the yard, and William told James to stand facing the fence so William could try to hit him in the back with a blunt arrow. James turned around just as William shot, and the arrow hit James in his left eye. After the initial shock the eye was not very painful, and Mame took James to a local doctor to have it treated. A few days later it was hurting, and Charles and Mame took him to a specialist in Washington, who removed the eye.
The Thurbers moved back to Columbus in June 1903. Charles fell ill in 1904, and when he did not recover quickly the family moved into Mame's parents' house. James hated living there, and arrangements were made for him to stay frequently with Margery Albright, the practical nurse who had attended his birth. Albright was known to the family as Aunt Margery, and between 1905 and 1910 James stayed with her often, sometimes for weeks at a time. James' brother Robert later described Albright as "a second mother" to James. Charles recovered after a few months, and by 1906 the Thurbers were living in Norwich Hotel.
James missed a year of school in Washington. He was enrolled in Sullivant Elementary School in Columbus, a year behind his age group. In third grade he met Eva Prout at Sullivant; they shared classes for the next six years. By the seventh grade he was infatuated with her. Prout left school after the eighth grade to pursue a singing and acting career, and Thurber occasionally saw her in silent movies over the next few years.
Thurber spent seventh and eighth grades at Douglas Junior High School. He was chosen to write the Class Prophecy in 1909—this was a common essay format at the time. Thurber imagined his schoolmates and himself in an adventure in a flying machine, in which the class appears to be doomed, but is surprised "to see James Thurber walking out on the beam", over the side of the plane, to remove a rope that was tangling a piece of equipment. The class "learned that James was a tight-rope walker with Barnsels and Ringbailey's circus". The story includes made-up technical terms such as "hythenometer" and "curobater", and is considered by Thurber scholars to contain the roots of the ideas that would later become Thurber's story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty".
Thurber attended East High School, starting in September 1909. He was a favorite with the teachers. A classmate recalls him as a "much better [writer] than the rest of us ... He was constantly drawing, and then throwing the drawings away, as if he had no further use for them". His first published story, "The Third Bullet", appeared in the high school magazine, X-rays; it was a western, and showed "not the slightest clue of literary promise", according to his biographer Burton Bernstein. Another biographer, Harrison Kinney, agrees that Thurber showed no sign of literary precocity, and that his high school years were not remarkable in any way. Thurber himself considered that he was a "late bloomer".
In about 1913 the Thurbers moved to 77 Jefferson Avenue. Thurber graduated from East High in June, and was accepted at Ohio State University, beginning classes in September that year. A highlight of his freshman year was a test given by Albert Weiss, Thurber's psychology professor, which made it apparent that Thurber had an astonishingly good memory. Thurber was proud of his performance and often mentioned it to acquaintances throughout his life. He also took English Composition, which focused on paragraphing, a form of humorous writing popular in newspapers of the day. Robert O. Ryder, the editor of the Ohio State Journal, was a popular paragrapher of the time, and Thurber was a great admirer of his work.
Thurber worked on both the Ohio State student publications: the Sundial, a monthly magazine, and the Ohio State Lantern, a newspaper; and became friends with Elliott Nugent, who was also writing for the Lantern. Nugent was much more successful than Thurber socially, and along with Jack Pierce, another student working on the Lantern, managed to get Thurber accepted into Phi Kappa Psi, one of the most prestigious fraternities at Ohio State. Thurber became editor-in-chief of the Sundial the next academic year (1917–1918), and chose Nugent as his assistant editor. He was called up for military service, and immediately rejected because of his missing eye. Many of his fellow students were now serving in the armed forces, and Thurber wrote much of the Sundial's material himself. Thurber became well-known and well-liked on campus, and both he and Nugent were nominated to Sphinx, an exclusive society for high-profile students. That year Thurber decided to leave OSU—without a degree, as he had not completed the mandatory graduation requirements. In January 1918 he applied for a job with the State Department.
Thurber was hired as a code clerk, and moved to Washington, D.C. on June 21, 1918. After several months of training he was assigned to the American Embassy in Paris; he arrived in France on November 13, two days after the Armistice. While in Washington and Paris Thurber corresponded both with Eva Prout, whom he had idealized for years, and with Minnette Fritts, a popular student at Ohio State whom he had dated in Columbus. In one of his letters he asked Prout to marry him; she refused, insisting that they meet in person before she could commit herself. Thurber had become an admirer of Henry James at Ohio State, and had thought of retaining his virginity "for his Jamesian ideal" woman, but he lost his virginity to a Folies Bergère dancer. He was conflicted about his experiences, and came home guilty and depressed. He left Paris in February 1920 and returned to Columbus. Fritts was married by the time Thurber came home, and he began a more intense courtship of Prout, who had quit her acting career because the film industry was much reduced by the war, and was now living in Zanesville, Ohio. By the end of 1920 she had rejected him.