Re- Revisiting Harrison Kinney’s Thurber Biography
When Harrison Kinney’s twelve hundred page Thurber biography was published in 1995, I thought of it as a grand treasure chest. It’s heavy, and it’s stuffed with an unbelievable amount of Thurber gold (i.e., information).
You want mini-biographies of the founding writers and editors of The New Yorker? This is the book for you. You want detailed information on just about every aspect of Thurber’s life? This book’s for you. Of my four go-to Thurber books (my sentimental favorite, Burton Bernstein’s fab Thurber bio; Kinney’s Thurber bio; Edwin T. Bowden’s Bibliography, and Thurber’s own The Years With Ross) Kinney’s is the weedsiest of the books, pausing along Thurber’s lifeline to explain, in detail, well, just about everything in Thurber’s orbit (one could argue that Bowden’s Thurber Bibliography is just as weedsy — argue amongst yourselves if you wish).
I was never a good student — didn’t retain information well (and still don’t unless I re-read, and then, if I love the book enough, re-re-read). I never got around to the third reading of Kinney’s book, which has now worked out just fine all these years later, as I suddenly have a desire to jump back into it.
The first thing I had to do was remove all the paper bookmarks that had been planted over time (you see them in a pile in the photo above). I’ll keep each marker — they were important once, they’ll probably be important again some day. For this third Kinney reading I had decided to open the book randomly every day and begin going through at different points in Thurber’s life. That plan ended after my first dive; I happened to crack open the book at the period just before Thurber was hired to work at The New Yorker. The narrative is so appealing that I’m going to stick with it and continue reading right through. Can’t wait for all the details I’ve forgotten or stored away way way back in my memory bank.
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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