Thumb through the Index of nearly any book about a New Yorker writer from the golden age of the magazine and you’ll find at least one mention of James Thurber. I semi-randomly took two books off the shelf this morning and found the following quotes from John Cheever, and Truman Capote. While Cheever’s Thurber mention is mainly about Harold Ross (The New Yorker‘s founder and first editor) it’s an interesting snippet.
John Cheever. Here’s Cheever talking about Ross’s death in a letter to New Yorker editor & writer, William Maxwell*:
“I leafed through the Thurber book [The Years With Ross] on Ross last night, and when I read the part where Hawley says: ‘It’s all over’ I burst into tears. I couldn’t stop.” [Hawley Traux, New Yorker Board member, and main go-between Harold Ross and Raoul Fleischmann].
Truman Capote. Here’s Capote talking to Eugene Walter, in 1957.** Walter is discussing writing classes with Capote:
“At the end, after all, the personality of the writer has so much to do with the work…The writer’s individual humanity, his word or gesture to the world, has to appear almost like a character that makes contact with the reader…Faulkner, McCullers — they project their personality at once. So does Thurber.”
*Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey. Knopf, 2009. p.153. Originally in a letter from Cheever to William Maxwell, dated Oct. 22 1959, deposited in the New York Public Library archives.
**Truman Capote Conversations. Edited by M. Thomas Inge University Press Of Mississippi, 1987. p.37. The interview originally appeared in the Intro Bulletin: A Literary Newspaper of the Arts, 2 (December 1957), 1-2.
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The Daily Cartoonist & Cartoon
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