Saturday Review’s Salute To Thurber
I believe that of all the notices following James Thurber’s passing in November 1961, it is E.B. White’s opening sentence in The New Yorker’s Thurber obituary (in the November 11th, ’61 issue) that is most remembered:
“I am one of the lucky ones; I knew him before blindness hit him, before fame hit him, and I tend always to think of him as a young artist in a small office in a big city…”
White’s entire piece is reprinted in The Saturday Review‘s terrific “Salute To Thurber” in their November 25, 1961 issue. A Malcolm Cowley piece opens the Salute (Mr. Cowley edited and wrote the introduction to a must-have book of interviews (Writers At Work. Viking, 1958) that includes a great Thurber interview conducted by George Plimpton, and Max Steele.
The Saturday Review Salute also features contributions by the New Yorker‘s St. Clair McKelway, and Peter DeVries (Thurberites will recall that Thurber was instrumental in bringing DeVries’s work to Harold Ross’s attention). The Salute (almost) concludes with a Thurber “Sampler” — five excerpts of work that had appeared in The New Yorker. “Walter Mitty” is (of course!) among the five.
The Saturday Review gives Thurber himself the last word, reproducing a letter — “one of the last letters he wrote” according to the The Saturday Review. This one line in his letter, for me, seems to embody so much of Thurber’s world:
“What is with everybody anyway?”
I find the entire Saturday Review Salute a gem. What makes it so is the inclusion of Thurber drawings on every page. I’m going to show just one page (I’m forever trying to be respectful of copyrights).
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For more information on those cited above:
…and here’s James 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. Website