James (Grover) Thurber Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on James (Grover) Thurber

In a general survey of American humor, James Thurber comes after the traditional horse-sense 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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