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
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“The Little Man” 1927 was a very big year for James Thurber. The February 26th issue carried his very first New Yorker appearances (two pieces of verse in the same issue).
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Jabberwock? I don’t claim to know about all things Thurber. My focus this past half century has been his drawings and collecting his books, with a particular emphasis on the former. I’m still learning about material that appeared after Thurber’s passing in November of 1961. Case in point: just last night, I learned of a 1972 play, Jabberwock, based on
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In all these years of thinking about James Thurber’s life and work I’ve never thought about exactly where he passed away. I knew it was in a hospital in Manhattan, and for decades that seemed to be enough to know. Checking in this morning with Burton Bernstein’s Thurber biography, Harrison Kinney’s Thurber biography, and Thurber’s New York Times obit, all
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