| James
Thurber |
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| Nationality - American |
Profession - Author & Illustrator |
| Date of birth - 1894
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Date of death - 1961 |
| Place of birth
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James Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio 1894. His father was Charles Leander (later surnamed Lincoln), a minor politician. Mary Thurber, his mother, was a strong-minded woman and a practical joker, whom her son depicted in his autobiographical stories MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES (1933).
Thurber's father, who had dreams of being an actor or lawyer, was said to have been the basis of the typical small, slight man of Thurber's stories.
Young James was partially blinded by a childhood accident - his brother William shot an arrow at him. When he was unable to participate in games and sports with other children, he developed a rich fantasy life, which would serve to inspire his later fiction.
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Thurber began writing at secondary school. He did not service in the WW I, but studied between 1913 and 1918 at the Ohio State University.
He worked as a code clerk in Washington, DC, and at the US embassy in Paris. In the early 1920s he worked as a journalist for several newspapers, and also lived in Paris writing for Chicago Tribune and trying to further his writing career.
In 1926 Thurber went to New York City, where he was a reporter for the Evening Post. Next year he joined Harold Ross's newly established The New Yorker, where he found his clear, concise prose style and where fifteen of his books first appeared. Thurber's wry humor showed great sensitivity to human fears and follies. Later Thurber published his memoirs from this period under the title THE YEARS WITH ROSS (1959).
Thurber was married twice, and had one daughter. In later years Thurber lived with his wife Helen Wismer at West Cornwall, Connecticut. Her devoted nursing enabled him to maintain his literary production and humour to the end. Thurber died of pneumonia on November 2, 1961, in New York. |
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James Thurber
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