E.B White and James Thurber — the names go together like soup and sandwich, or, um…horse and carriage. New Yorker history buffs will recall that Thurber’s first book, Is Sex Necessary, was co-authored with E.B. White, and that the two shared an office at The New Yorker in their earliest years at the magazine.
It was White who fished a Thurber drawing of a seal on a rock out of Thurber’s trash can in that very same office, and submitted it to The New Yorker‘s art meeting, bringing Thurber’s art to Harold Ross’s attention. It has also been been written that White brought Thurber into The New Yorker (but there seems to be a little bit of murkiness there as to who exactly facilitated Thurber’s initial New Yorker entree).
left: White and Thurber, Snedens Landing, NY, 1929
One of the pleasures of producing Ink Spill is being in touch with the magazine’s cartoonists. Edward Frascino, who began contributing to The New Yorker in 1965, has been incredibly generous to this site over the years. Just the other day he wrote and asked if I’d be interested in a letter he received from E.B. White back in 1970. Ed had illustrated White’s The Trumpet Of The Swan, (published in 1970).
When the White letter arrived yesterday, it was one of those moments I won’t soon forget. I cannot show you the letter (I’m not looking for copyright trouble), but I think it’s fine to show you what you see above — which, in itself is, for me, loaded with meaning. In this age of email, an envelope, with a stamp, a sticker, and a typed (on a typewriter) address seems so personal.
After numerous re-readings of both Scott Elledge’s E.B. White: A Biography and Linda Davis’s Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White, just seeing “No Brooklin, Me” on the return address sticker created a giant whoosh of remembered White/New Yorker/Thurber history.
This letter, the first E.B. White letter to be included in the Spill’s archive, joins other letters by a number of White’s New Yorker contemporaries including, among others, Philip Hamburger, William Maxwell, and William Shawn.
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Further Reading:
James Thurber’s A-Z Entry:
James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”
Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website