Conversations with James Thurber

Marc Notes: Also avail. in cloth at $28.95 First pub'd in U. K. Publisher Marketing: In "Conversations with James Thurber" this remarkable man who has been called America's twentieth-century Mark Twain and who was one of the great talkers of his time expresses his opinions on just about everything and recounts stories and anecdotes about his life which provided the basis for much of his humor writing. These entertaining interviews, conducted by Arthur Miller, Harvey Breit, George Plimpton, Arthur Gelb, and others, span twenty-two years, from 1939--1961. In them Thurber recalls his youth in Columbus, Ohio, his struggles as a student at Ohio State University, and his days of literary and journalistic apprenticeship in Europe as a code clerk and newspaperman who had to recreate entire stories from a few words of coded copy provided by the wire service. He tells too of his early days in New York City when he joined the staff of "The New Yorker," of the origins of his drawings, of the pleasures that word games and mental puzzles gave him, and of his increasing blindness and its effect on his work and his perception of the world. As a man who like to express his opinions and to have an audience, Thurber enjoyed interviews and rarely refused to grant them. With the interview format he became so skilled that he perfected the interview-monologue into a Thurberesque art form, the oral equivalent of the autobiographical essay that he refined in his prose.

Contributor Bio:  Thurber, James James Thurber was an American author and cartoonist best known for his illustrations and short stories published in The New Yorker magazine. Thurber attended Ohio State University, but never graduated as a result of his poor eyesight. In 1925, Thurber relocated to New York and became a reporter for the New York Evening Post. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1927 and began drawing cartoons in 1930. Thurber left The New Yorker in 1933 but continued to contribute regularly until 1950. Many of Thurber's famous short stories?--such as "The Dog that Bit People," "The Night the Bird Fell," and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"--have been compiled into anthologies, and his classic tale about the daydreaming everyman served as the inspiration for the 2013 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty starring Ben Stiller and Kristen Wiig. Thurber passed away in 1961. Contributor Bio:  Fensch, Thomas Thomas has published 17 nonfiction books.