Surprised (although I shouldn’t have been) to run across a contribution from James Thurber in this paperback, Great Flying Stories, published in 1958 by Dell. You can see on the cover that Thurber gets top billing, right beside Charles Lindbergh. The Thurber piece, “The Greatest Man In The World,” originally appeared in The New Yorker February 7, 1931. Below is a
Read more
Thurber’s Shakespeare The other day I ran (online) into this wonderful double page spread in the September 1935 issue of Stage Magazine: “James Thurber Presents William Shakespeare.” Bowden’s James Thurber: A Bibliography, is ever-so-slightly off in his accounting of the Stage drawings, saying there are four drawings (there are five). Not clear to me why these were run white
Read more
The other day, Scott Burns, a friend of the Spill sent along scans of a rather obscure item: Thurber’s contribution to this booklet of text with accompanying records is “Harmonica Man,” a piece about Larry Adler (Peter Harrington, A London bookseller selling a copy (for $517.98), has this terrific write-up on the set). I came up empty-handed when looking through
Read more
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.
Read more