His Life and Times
His Life and Times
A CHRONOLOGY
1894:
Thurber is born on
December 8 on
a self-described "night of wild portent" in Columbus,
Ohio, to
Mary Fisher Thurber and Charles L. Thurber, the second
of the
family's three sons.
1901:
In Washington, D. C.,
where the
family was living temporarily, Thurber is shot in the
eye while
playing a bow-and-arrow game with his brothers. This
causes blindness
in one eye; sight in his other eye continued to fail
throughout
his adult life.
1903–07:
Thurber attends Sullivant
Elementary
School in Columbus.
1908–09:
Thurber attends Douglas
Junior High
School, where he writes his Class Prophecy, featuring
himself
as an unlikely hero in an active world (hinting perhaps
at a Walter
Mitty character?).
1909–13:
Thurber attends East High
School,
where he is elected class president in his senior year
and graduates
with honor.
1913–15:
Thurber enters The Ohio
State University,
commuting by trolley from the family home at 77
Jefferson Avenue.
He struggles with the required ROTC and gym courses, as
well as
in science labs, partly because of his poor eyesight.
1916–18:
Thurber begins his
sophomore year
again at age 21. He meets Elliot Nugent, who introduces
him to
fraternity and social life. Along with Nugent, Thurber
reports
for the college paper, the Lantern, and becomes
editor-in-chief
of the Sundial humor and literary magazine.
Thurber leaves
Ohio State in 1918 without completing his degree.
1918–20:
Thurber works for the
State Department,
first in Washington DC, and then at the American Embassy
in Paris.
1920–21:
Thurber returns to
Columbus and
begins working as a reporter for The Columbus
Dispatch.
Also writes and directs musical comedies for the Scarlet
Mask
Club at Ohio State.
1922:
Thurber marries Althea
Adams, Ohio
State beauty with dominant personality who may have
influenced
the character of the "Thurber woman."
1924:
Thurber resigns from The
Dispatch
to try freelance writing.
1925–26:
Thurber returns to Paris
and is
a reporter for The Chicago Tribune. He is later
transferred
to the Riviera edition in Nice.
1926:
Thurber and Althea return
to America
in June and move to New York City, where Thurber begins
working
as a reporter and feature writer for the New York
Evening Post.
1927:
At a party, Thurber meets
E. B.
White, who introduces him to Harold Ross. Ross
immediately hires
Thurber as editor-writer for The New Yorker.
1929:
Thurber's first book, Is
Sex
Necessary?, is published in collaboration with New
Yorker
office mate E. B. White.
1930:
With the encouragement of
White,
Thurber's first cartoons appear in The New Yorker.
1931:
Thurber's only child,
Rosemary,
is born on October 7.
1935:
After several years of
difficulty
and separations, James and Althea divorce in May; James
marries
Helen Wismer, an editor, in June.
1936:
James and Helen move to
Connecticut.
Thurber leaves The New Yorker staff officially in
order
to freelance, but keeps a contractual agreement for his
writing
with the magazine.
1937–38:
Helen and James travel
abroad in
France and England. Thurber has a one-man show of his
drawings
at the Storran Gallery in London.
1939–40:
Thurber collaborates with
college
buddy Elliot Nugent on The Male Animal, a play
about Ohio
State, which was an enormous success on Broadway with
243 performances
in the 1939-40 season.
1942:
By now, Thurber has
serious eye
problems and uses the Zeiss loupe in order to continue
drawing.
The Thurbers briefly move back to New York.
1944:
Thurber's overall health
begins
to decline. He is critically ill with pneumonia and
appendicitis
this year.
1945:
James and Helen move into
"The Great
Good Place," a 14-room Colonial style home in West
Cornwall, Connecticut.
1950:
Thurber receives his first
honorary
doctorate, a Doctor of Letters Degree from Kenyon
College in Ohio.
A second honorary doctorate is bestowed upon Thurber
from William's
College in Massachusetts.
1951:
Thurber declines
the honorary
Doctor of Letters degree from his alma mater, Ohio
State, in protest
over its suppression of academic freedom during the
reign of the
House Un-American Activities Committee.
1953:
Thurber is awarded a third
honorary
Doctor of Letters from Yale University. He also receives
the Ohioana
Sesquicentennial Medal. Thurber's health continues to
fail as
a thyroid condition causes erratic behavior.
1958:
Thurber returns to England
to become
the first American since Mark Twain to be called "to the
table"
at Punch.
1960:
Thurber appears in
eighty-eight
performances as himself in A Thurber Carnival, a
revue
based on his writings and drawings and produced at the
ANTA Theatre
in New York.
1961:
Thurber is stricken with a
blood
clot in his brain in early October in New York. He dies a
month
later on November 2. His ashes are interred at Greenlawn
Cemetery
in Columbus, Ohio, plot 50.
Thurber Posthumously
1972:
Thurber Theatre is
dedicated at
Ohio State's Drake Union.
1984:
Thurber House, located
in what
was James's home during his college years, opens as a
literary
arts center and museum of Thurber materials.
1994:
Thurber becomes the first
Columbus
native to be featured on a US Postal Service
commemorative stamp
(three months from the 100th anniversary of his birth.)
1995:
Thurber receives the first
ever
posthumous Doctor of Humane Letters degree from his alma
mater,
The Ohio State University. His daughter Rosemary
accepts.
