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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This time of year, when there’s snow on the ground (as there is here in upstate New York), reminds me of a long-time favorite passage in the third paragraph of the Foreword of Burton Bernstein‘s fabulous Thurber biography, published in 1976. I won’t repeat the paragraph here so as to avoid ruffling copyright feathers, but I believe it’s fair to
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There are a lot of fun Thurber factoids to be found in Edwin Bowden‘s James Thurber: A Bibliography (Ohio State University Press, 1968). Since I brought it home from Columbus, Ohio (I bought it in the Thurber House gift shop, of all places) I’ve gone to this book a zillion times for all sorts of Thurber-related issues that’ve come up.
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