A Recent Addition: The Pacemaker
It’s always the very best day when a James Thurber original arrives at Spill headquarters.
The Seal In The Bedroom, Thurber’s first collection of drawings,* published in 1932, includes a series of thirty-five drawings under the heading of “The Race Of Life.” Thurber introduced the series, in part, this way:
“This sequence of thirty-five drawings represents the life story of a man and his wife; or several days, a month, or a year in the life and in that of their child; or their alternately interflowing and diverging streams of consciousness over any given period.”
The 8th drawing in the series is The Pacemaker.
In a new “Author’s Memoir” included in the 1950 edition of The Seal In The Bedroom, Thurber wrote:
“…It’s not easy to remember, after all these eras, why I was determined to get out a book of drawings as early as the fall of 1932, less than two years after I had begun to draw for The New Yorker. Perhaps I was afraid that the world was going to come to an end in in 1933…
…there wasn’t enough New Yorker stuff, so that most of the contents had to be drawn especially for the book and have never appeared anywhere else, unless you can count Doris Humphrey’s daring reconstruction of “The Race of Life” in her ballet.”
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*Is Sex Necessary, co-authored with E.B.White, published in 1929, contains Thurber illustrations.
James Thurber’s A-Z Entry:
James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”
Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website