Re- Revisiting Harrison Kinney’s Thurber Biography When Harrison Kinney’s twelve hundred page Thurber biography was published in 1995, I thought of it as a grand treasure chest. It’s heavy, and it’s stuffed with an unbelievable amount of Thurber gold (i.e., information). You want mini-biographies of the founding writers and editors of The New Yorker? This is the book for you.
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I can’t be in Maine without thinking of the Whites, E.B. and Katharine (and Roger Angell of course). On our yearly long drive up here we pass through Ellsworth, one of the “big towns” close to Brooklin where the White’s saltwater farm is located. Anyone who has read White’s classic collection of essays, One Man’s Meat will come across
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In the Fall of 1986, Liza Donnelly, and I went for a drive in northwestern Connecticut to find the home James Thurber lived in from 1945 until he passed away in 1961. All we had to go on was a photo that appeared in Burton Bernstein’s Thurber biography (the photo identified the home as “the great good place”), and that the house
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Many many years ago, before I began holding onto every New Yorker-centric thing that came my way, I gave my first edition copy of Thurber’s 1939 classic, The Last Flower to a friend (the friend who showed me the very first Thurber drawing I’d ever seen). Over the years I stayed away from re-acquiring a first edition (I did acquire
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