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 fascinated me at first sight. Somewhere along the way — I honestly can’t remember — I came to know that the photo was taken in Sneden’s Landing, New York, where Katharine White lived for a time (there’s much much more to this, but I won’t go into it here. Check out the Elledge E.B. White biography, and Linda Davis’s biography, Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White, as well Amy Reading’s K.S.W. bio, The World She Edited).
Today, after perhaps a half hour of searching the internet, and consulting several of the aforementioned books, I found the location of the house and, very happily, a close-up of the steps, which I’m showing here. The house, called The Larry Sneden House, along with Larry’s brother’s house, are located at the end of a road hard by The Hudson River (both houses still stand).
Getting weedsy for a moment, The National Registry of Historic Places has this to say about the Larry Sneden House, which they say was built around 1780: built of masonry…transitional in form and reflect[s] the influence of the Federal style upon the later development of Dutch vernacular traditions in the multiple resource area.
Here’s a wider look at the Sneden’s property.
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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
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