Thurber’s “Best” New Yorker Year (For Drawings)
Looking through the database that was the meat of 2005’s The Complete New Yorker, I never fail to find something of interest: something I hadn’t seen before, or something that leads me to something I never thought of before. I’ve known for quite some time that James Thurber’s best years contributing drawings to the magazine were in the 1930s. His failing eyesight in the early 1940s cut short what most certainly would have been decades of additional drawings.
After Thurber’s excellent drawing debut in 1931 with 23 drawings published in The New Yorker, the next 9 years saw numbers that would make any contributing cartoonist’s ink bottle spin. His peak year was 1934, when he contributed 47 drawings. A good percentage of those were dedicated to the 17 part series, The War Between Men and Woman.
1934 was the year my personal favorite Thurber drawing appeared — the one that changed my life: July 14, 1934’s “What have you done with Dr. Millmoss.”
If I could, I’d show each and every drawing from the year. I’d say they were the best of Thurber but that would be unfair to the many wonderful, and often classic Thurber drawings that appeared elsewhere in the 1930s. I will show you one from ’34 (the one at the top of this post) from my long long list of favorite Thurber drawings. It appeared in the issue of August 18, 1934.
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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
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Two Further Notes…
The below fab 1935 (non-New Yorker) Thurber original was auctioned this past week (hammer price: $3,000.00):
And…….
As mentioned here on Monday, my colleague, Navied Mahdavian has a graphic piece, “James Thurber, Consummate Doodler” in this week’s “Cartoons and Puzzles” special issue of The New Yorker. See it here