Latest Addition To The Spill Library: The Last Flower
A big thank you to Sara Thurber Sauers for this University of Iowa Press edition of James Thurber’s The Last Flower. Originally published in November of 1939 by Harper’s, The Last Flower has shown itself to “have legs.”
Legend, according to Thurber himself, has it that the entire book was completed in one sitting at The Algonquin Hotel. In a letter appearing in Thurber’s Letters, he wrote that The Last Flower “grew out of a drawing” titled The Last Flower, published in The New Yorker in the issue of September 16, 1933.*
In another letter, Thurber wrote of how the book came about:
“After Mrs. Thurber went to bed…I set about doing some drawings in the next room, and after an hour’s silence she called in to me, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’ve just finished a book.’” [Harrison Kinney, a Thurber biographer notes that Thurber also said, at one time, that he’d completed “only twenty-three of the fifty-three drawings” that evening**…but having “the entire book sketched out in drawings and text” is generally accepted***. I’m wondering if the confusion has to do with the time it took to ink in the finished book. Thurber at one point noted it took him several hours just to do the inking].
In Thurber’s own The Years With Ross, he had this to say about The Last Flower, and why he didn’t submit it to Harold Ross for possible publication in The New Yorker:
“In 1939 I did all the drawings for The Last Flower between dinner and bedtime one evening, but spared Ross this flux of pictures, because I didn’t want to be responsible for his having a seizure of some kind.”
*Harrison Kinney, Editor. The Thurber Letters. Simon & Schuster, 2002. p. 445.
**Harrison Kinney. James Thurber: His Life and Times. Henry Holt, 1995. p. 737.
*** Burton Bernstein. Thurber: A Biography. Dodd Mead & Co., 1975. p. 318.
Not too long ago, the Spill showed its readers various editions through the years (only a couple of these are in the Spill library):
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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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