Buried in Harrison Kinney’s monumental Thurber biography (James Thurber: His Life and Times, Henry Holt, 1995) is a passage (on page 306) about the period (in 1926) just before Thurber (and his first first wife, Althea) moved to Horatio Street in Greenwich Village, and broke into The New Yorker.
The strip cartoonist, Victor (“Dwig”) Dwiggins (creator of “School Days” among many others) who had met the Thurbers in Italy, invited them to stay at his camp at Green Lake in Gloversville, New York. According to Kinney, Dwiggins named two of his strip characters “Jim” and “Althea.” The Thurbers stayed for the summer, in a tent in the yard, while Thurber wrote a 30,000 word parody, Why We Behave Like Microbe Hunters [never published, although parts of it were included in Thurber & E.B. White’s Is Sex Necessary].
Above: Dwiggins’s home on Green Lake
There are tidbits of Green Lake stories in various Thurber-centric books…here’s a short one:
In “The Techniques Of Good Manners” a 1936 pamphlet by Mary Perin Barker, cited by Kinney, Thurber tells of a bad moment in a canoe at the lake:
“My difficulties with watercraft began some fifteen years ago at Green Lake, New York, when in stepping into a canoe I accidentally trod on a sleeping Boston Terrier that I didn’t know was in the canoe…What followed was a deplorable and improbable fiasco…”
More on “Dwig” from Paul Tumey on The Comics Journal site.
Thurber’s entry on the Spill‘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. A short bio appears on the Thurber House website: http://www.thurberhouse.org/about-james-thurber/