James Thurber

If heredity is destiny, then James Thurber probably was fated to be a bit odd, although not necessarily funny. (His two brothers were merely odd.) James Thurber's maternal great-grandfather, Jacob Fisher, was a huge blacksmith renowned for stern religious and political beliefs, fiercely defended with his fists. Nevertheless, while he fought like a demon in support of Methodism and in opposition to Andrew Jackson, he also was known to treat the wounds of his vanquished foes and to harbor no enduring animosity toward them. He was a man of immense strength and singularity of purpose who sometimes picked up a horse to move it from one place to another, rather than go to the trouble of leading it around. So it was that the classmates of half-blind, awkward, fourteen-yearold James Thurber got a preview peek into the secret life of Walter Mitty.

Entering East High School , Columbus 's best, Jamie continued to shine, becoming, as he later put it, "just a woman teacher's pet," and something of a class leader. His first published story, a hokey Western saga entitled The Third Bullet, appeared in X-Rays, the East High School magazine, which he longed to edit. Years later, he discovered that his mother had asked the school's principal to deny him the editorship because of his eye problems. Another ambition was not thwarted. He decided to run for senior class president in 1913 and won. He graduated with honors and gave the President's Address at the Class Day Program. It was a heady moment for an eighteen-year-old who had overcome major handicaps.

A show of James Thurber's drawings opened in the spring of 1937 in London , the Thurbers' next stop. His work had always been popular in England , given the British fondness for things slightly balmy, and his reception there was enthusiastic and friendly. "The hallmark of sophistication," the London Daily Sketch proclaimed, "is to adore the drawings of James Thurber." He reciprocated in kind, writing little pieces for English newspapers, granting interviews and even agreeing to a British Broadcasting Corporation request that he appear on an odd new medium called television and draw some pictures for the audience. James Thurber wrote home to friends that the viewers saw everything he drew "clear as a bell." Later he covered some of the Davis Cup competition at Wimbledon for The New Yorker by watching a match on a ten-inch TV screen, which he likened to "a photograph in an album come to life."

James Thurber had met De Vries following publication of a graceful and keen analysis of Thurber's work that the young editor had written for Poetry and titled "James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock." De Vries observed that Thurber's stories, especially those in which mispronunciations and word games play a central role, signaled his greater kinship with modern poets than humorists. T. S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, "lost in the fumes of introspection," De Vries wrote, is the solemn counterpart of James Thurber's preoccupied, bumbling middle-aged man on the flying trapeze.