Back in 1980, I was booted out of my apartment on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village (see my 11th Street downstair’s neighbor, Donald Barthelme’s December 4, 1978 Talk Of The Town piece about the building’s landlord — I’m one-half of trembling “…young cohabiting couple…” he mentions). Needing a break from Manhattan I took up an offer from an illustrator
Read more
After breezing through a book or three of Thurber’s drawings, it’s sometimes fun to settle down with either of the two books of his letters. The first published, Selected Letters Of James Thurber (Atlantic, Little & Brown, 1981) was edited by his second wife, Helen Thurber, and Thurber’s friend (and Atlantic editor), Edward Weeks. Although Selected Letters was published half
Read moreThere are two fave Thurber biographies in this house: Burton Bernstein’s Thurber: A Biography, and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life And Times. I like to think of them as perfect bookends to any Thurber collection. Bernstein’s (left), at 532 pages is the quick read; Kinney’s is 1,238. I think of the two books as I think of my two
Read moreJames Thurber, Cartoon Critic On a recent search through Thurber biographies in the Spill library I happened upon a Thurber letter I’d forgotten about. Written to Harold Ross, and dated October 20, 1941, it appears in the mother ship of all Thurber biographies, Harrison Kinney’s twelve hundred and thirty-eight page Thurber: His Life And Times (Henry Holt, 1995). Thurber, unhappy
Read more