Thurber’s 126th
James Grover Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio on this day in 1894…if my math is correct, that’s 126 years ago. I know, I know, it’s not a big deal number, like 150, or 200, but I can’t let any Thurber birthday slip by without a mention.
The Spill has probably seen about as many Thurber posts as any other New Yorker artist, and with good reason: seeing his art for the first time while I was still in high school re-directed my thinking about drawing, and that led me to The New Yorker over four decades ago. I owe him big time.
Here are my Thurber desert island book picks — each worth hunting down:
The Thurber Carnival. If Thurber was a recording artist, this would be his Greatest Hits.
Thurber: A Biography, by Burton Bernstein. The less in-the-weeds read of the two excellent Thurber biographies out there (the other is Harrison Kinney’s His Life and Times).
A Mile And A Half Of Lines, Edited by Michael Rosen. This is the perfect bookend to The Thurber Carnival. Michael Rosen has given us a gift of Thurber in modern times: unpublished Thurber (as well as published), beautiful reproductions of original art, and commentary from a number of Thurberites (including this one).
Shown at the top of the post: a Thurber dog eraser from a few decades ago.