Yesterday afternoon, a “funny” moment: I was going through a manila folder at the bottom of a box full of James Thurber-centric manila folders (all courtesy of Michael Rosen) when I came across this undated news clipping by James Thurber that began:
“Just the other afternoon, I was going through an old manila envelope containing the odds and ends, the snippets and symbols of my life. I found familiar and forgotten things: page 3 of a piece of mysterious writing, fluttering yellowly between a vanished beginning and a lost ending, making no more sense than the shouting of children at play on a frosty night…”
It was slightly odd and slightly amusing, finding myself replicating something Thurber had done many many moons ago. But of course the “odds and ends” I came across were “snippets” of his life, not mine.
I liked thinking of Thurber thumbing through a stack of clippings, of sheets of paper. In my case, I was looking to run across something new (to me) for Thurber Thursday. When “Just the other afternoon, I was going through an old manila envelope…” turned up, I found it.
–The quoted passage appears in a clipping titled “Writer’s Age Measured By Reject Slips” (there’s no indication of where it appeared, and, as mentioned above, the piece is not dated)
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James Thurber’s A-Z:
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