James Thurber’s Last New Yorker Caption
By the late 1940s, early 1950s, when Thurber’s eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer see to draw, he would occasionally send cartoon ideas to The New Yorker. In an interview with Henry Brandon that appeared in The New Republic,* May 26, 1958, Thurber said:
“I haven’t sent any captions to the New Yorker for years. The last one was illustrated by Whitney Darrow. It showed an ardent young lady talking to a gloomy young man and she is saying: “When you say you hate your own species, do you mean everybody?” I think that’s the last caption of mine they took.”
Above: Whitney Darrow’s drawing, using Thurber’s caption. Published in The New Yorker, November 18, 1950.
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More reading:
*The interview also appears in Conversations with James Thurber, Edited by Thomas Fensch, University of Mississippi Press, 1989.
Thurber’s Last Original New Yorker Drawing: “The Last Man Sitting”(Ink Spill, March 14, 2012)
“A Composite Thurber’ (Ink Spill, November 12, 2020)
Whitney Darrow, Jr.’s A-Z Entry:
Whitney Darrow, Jr. Born August 22, 1909, Princeton, NJ. Died August, 1999, Burlington, Vermont. New Yorker work: 1933 -1982. Quote (Darrow writing of himself in the third person): …in 1931 he moved to New York City, undecided between law school and doing cartoons as a profession. The fact that the [New Yorker’s] magazine offices were only a few blocks away decided him…” (Quote from catalogue, Meet the Artist, 1943)
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