James Thurber: Fabulist for Our Time

The New York Public Library is commemorating the quasquicentennial of the birth of James Thurber, one of America’s most celebrated authors and humorists, best known for his cartoons and short stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker.

On September 9, 2019, Grand Central Library will launch a lecture circuit featuring writer and editor Michael J. Rosen, founding director of the James Thurber House, to discuss a new edition of Collected Fables, which contains all of Thurber’s most beloved stories and previously unpublished material. Exposing our foibles through fables, Thurber is more timely and timeless than ever.

In anticipation of this NYPL Talk, entitled Collected Fables: 125 Years of James Thurber, I had the opportunity to interview Rosen about the event, Thurber's work and legacy, and Library archives of Thurber's writings.
 

What will you discuss at your upcoming NYPL Talk?

Rosen: We’ll be looking at Thurber’s fables, in particular: Concise and shrewd reactions to the troubling, baffling world that Thurber endured during and after, and between, the two Great Wars. Fables, that amazingly and sadly, have profound relevance to today’s culture.

We’ve lost sight of Thurber’s profound contribution to American letters and drawings. Neither humor nor cartoons "went around looking the way they do" before Thurber’s pre-intentional, untrained lines. Humor had no great practitioner of the form. While at The New Yorker, he changed the voice of humor—a ventriloquism of sorts. Satire, parody, spoofs—Thurber mastered these and added a whole repertoire of comic forms, even as he bemoaned the short shrift comedy received when compared to "more serious" work.

Mr. Thurber is perhaps best known for his cartoons and short stories published mainly in The New Yorker magazine. Can you describe his cultural connection and legacy to New York?

Rosen: A native son of Columbus, Ohio, Thurber left Ohio State University without a degree… preferring a year of reading and self-study. He had been drawing, but just as an idle pastime. After a stint writing columns for the local newspaper and a stint at the Paris edition of the Tribune, he landed a job as managing editor at a fledgling magazine, The New Yorker, in 1927.

As he describes it, Thurber worked his way down to being a writer. Sharing an office with E. B. White, he dove into the unique sophistication of the magazine’s prose. And, although Thurber dashed off drawings in pencil on memo pads and typing sheets, White recognized the unconventional charm of the work. He inked in the lines, submitted the cartoons to the magazine’s editors and, after a number of rejections, Thurber, the untrained artist, created a loose, concise flurry of lines—not merely captions—that were humorous. He contributed to The New Yorker for most of his adult life, even as he and his second wife Helen moved to Connecticut, even as he claimed that the "clocks that chime in my dreams are the clocks of Columbus. 

NYPL has numerous archive holdings related to James Thurber, including the New Yorker records, (ca.1924-1984), the James M. Geraghty papers, (1940-1983), and the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature Uncataloged Manuscripts, to name only a few. How does a using special collection contribute to your research?

Rosen: We’re all tempted to take things at face value. For granted. As relayed by whatever source might be first or foremost. But underneath any of that is the complexity that goes beyond summary statements and quips and clips edited for space. History is not a collective voice of what’s familiar. It’s the perspectives and nuanced observations of all who shared—and in the case of writers or artists—recorded or responded to a particular time. Primary and secondary sources, original letters, and unseen manuscripts have dramatically changed my ideas of who Thurber was and what his "Life and Hard Times" might have been like.

What are your personal favorite James Thurber pieces?

Rosen: An aspect of my continued pleasure in the work is that there is such a range. Such a surprising array of topics, prose styles, and visual work. His works for young readers… are just as appealing to adults. And his prose is so burnished (he had a photographic memory, so, especially after the last of sight was lost, he would compose in his head, tumbling words and sentences this way and that way, and then dictate the polished text to a typist) that the pleasure he takes in the subtleties, sounds, connotations, and oddity of the English language always feels feisty and fresh.

As for favorites, most of us point to The Thurber Carnival as the perfect selection. Thurber chose those works. It includes his most famous book, the autobiographical stories of My Life and Hard Times that Russell Baker once called "the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written."

In general, what are some overlooked or underappreciated books, music, and films you would like to encourage our community to explore?

Rosen: This is not just a whole new can of worms, it’s like a 24-pack you get at Costco. Where to begin? Let me say, instead, the transformative joy of spending time in the library—for my first 40 years, I wandered aisles almost blindly looking, I leafed through card catalogs astonished that there could be so many books on almost any word or name or topic I could imagine—is the unexpected.

Finding what else is on the shelf next to the book you wanted. Asking a librarian what else is like what I just finished. Stumbling upon this or that… and coming home with a stack of books that may or may not be cued to your current desire and, yet, you had the chance to expand your universe by this many decimal points, inches, ideas. That’s what I would recommend. Exploring. Taking the pleasure in browsing rather than finding.

Full Schedule of Collected Fables: 125 Years of James Thurber  

Monday, September 9, 2019
6pm
Grand Central Library
135 East 46th St. New York, NY 10017

Tuesday, September 10, 2019
5:30pm
Mulberry Street Branch
10 Jersey St. New York, NY 10012

Wednesday, September 11, 2019
5:30pm
St. Agnes Branch
444 Amsterdam Ave. New York, NY 10024

Please RSVP here via email to reserve your spot. 
For additional details, please contact your local NYPL branch.
 

About Michael J. Rosen:
Writer, illustrator, and editor of some 150 books for readers of all ages, Michael J. Rosen has also edited six collections of James Thurber's works. The founding literary director of The Thurber House, the cultural arts center located in Thurber’s boyhood home in Columbus, Ohio, Rosen's two latest books will be featured at the NYPL events: Collected Fables (HarperCollins, 2019), one volume with Thurber's two previous books of fables, new illustrations, and ten uncollected fables; and A Mile and a Half of Lines: The Art of James Thurber (Trillium; The Ohio State University Press, 2019), the first monograph to consider Thurber’s entire contribution as a cartoonist and illustrator, with more than 100 unpublished images.

About Gregory Stall:
Librarian Gregory Stall works at the Grand Central branch of the New York Public Library. He is currently collaborating with the NYPL Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs and Picture Collection on an exhibition of Aesop/fable-related images with a corresponding display of reads for all ages.

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