I recently picked up Mary Dearborn’s Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (Knopf, 2017). With biographies, I usually go right to the index to check out New Yorker intersections and found plenty on Lillian Ross (because of her well-known portrait of Hemingway, “How Do You Like it Now, Gentlemen? The Moods Of Ernest Hemingway” that ran in the issue of May 13, 1950). Just two Thurber mentions in the Index, with the one on page 478 the more interesting. Here’s Dearborn on Hemingway, in 1945, writing to his wife, Mary about his difficulty in getting down to work:
“…he wrote Mary that he wished he could hire some other people — like James Thurber — to do his writing for him.”
This surprise led me to browse around in other places for Thurber/Hemingway intersections. Here are a few I found.
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Thurber wrote this piece (only showing an excerpt here) published in The New Yorker, December 24, 1927:
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…From Thurber: A Biography by Burton Bernstein:
“…Hemingway told Dorothy Parker that Thurber’s was ‘the best writing coming out of America.’”
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Hemingway’s complimentary words used as a blurb on the cover of Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times:
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Finally, from Jstor, you can see Thurber’s copy of Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa
— what makes this particular 1935 title interesting to us Thurberites are the Thurber drawings scattered throughout the copy. Here’s one:
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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