Today marks the 127th anniversary of James Thurber’s birth (born December 8, 1894, in Columbus, Ohio). I couldn’t wait til Thurber Thursday to celebrate (mostly because it would’ve been a day late).
It will come as absolutely no surprise to regular Spill visitors that Thurber’s been on my mind a lot. And by “a lot,” I mean since around 1971, when I saw my first Thurber drawing.
The past week I’ve been revisiting early copies of The New Yorker. I do that on a somewhat regular basis, selecting issues at random. But the past week I spent some time going through 1933 issues, chronologically (ala A New Yorker State of Mind) looking at each as if it was a new issue. By doing that, I realized I was treating the magazine as “something that’s alive” (as it was referred to in a hugely important moment for the magazine).
Think of any early issue of The New Yorker that way and it ceases to be a museum piece. What’s so not surprising, as I went from issue to issue, is that Thurber works in 2021 as well as Thurber worked in any year his work appeared in The New Yorker.
Here’s the Thurber website to visit on his birthday…and any day. It’s overseen by Michael Rosen, who knows his Thurber like nobody’s business :
