James Grove Thurber Biography

Encyclopedia of World Biography on James Grove Thurber

In a general survey of American humor, James Thurber comes after the traditional horsesense humorists and before the black humorists of the postatomic era. His most famous and most enduring work developed after he became associated in 1927 with the two-year-old New Yorker magazine, a periodical that strove to be sophisticated but not stuffy, urbane but not effete. He never completed a thoroughly unified long work, though he did produce, in collaboration with Elliott Nugent, a successful three-act play, The Male Animal (1940). He is best known for his short pieces, especially for his almost conversational yet elegantly crafted "casuals," a word used by New Yorker editor Harold Ross "for fiction and humorous pieces of all kinds." Neither Thurber nor his New Yorker colleagues created the so- called little man character and the sort of humor with which this well-known twentieth-century type is associated. Still, Thurber's particular elaboration of the type and the near identity of his narrative persona with the personality of the fictional little man became a Thurber trademark, and the phrase "Thurber man" (as well as "Thurber woman"—though she is a different matter altogether) has become commonplace in discussions of American humor.

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