E.B. White And James Thurber Sitting On Some Steps In Sneden’s Landing Above: a 1829 map showing Sneden’s Landing (just “Landing” in those days) at the top left to the west of the Hudson River. Scott Elledge’s wonderful E.B. White biography (published in 1984) includes a 1929 photograph showing E.B. White and James Thurber sitting on some steps. The photo
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Was One Of Thurber’s Best Known Drawings Originally A “Spot” Drawing? First, a brief reminder of what’s what: New Yorker “Spot” drawings are not New Yorker cartoons. Once upon a time, pre-Tina Brown era, Spots were those unrelated, uncaptioned drawings by various artists, placed here and there throughout the magazine. They could be humorous, but they could also be simply
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Until modern times*, it wasn’t that often we’d see one cartoonist reference another cartoonist’s work. Here’s an example from (I’m guessing) 1947, when Hollywood turned out the Danny Kaye film of Thurber’s The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty. In this case, the cartoonist referencing another was Robert Kraus, a New Yorker colleague of Thurber’s… but the drawing did not appear
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As I’ve leisurely made my way through decades of the earliest back issues of The New Yorker I’ve come across a number of things I never cataloged before. Below are three full page ads featuring Thurber art for the play “Rain From Heaven”— it doesn’t appear that Thurber had anything to do with the play other than contributing these illustrations
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