It is no coincidence that The New Yorker is the most successful humor magazine in American literary history¹ and that in the public mind James Thurber is identified with this journal. The New Yorker turned out to be the perfect vehicle for publishing Thurber’s work. While he did publish elsewhere, his other outlets were few and of limited effect, and he was lucky that The New Yorker came along when it did. At the same time, it was fortuitous for the magazine that Thurber came along when he did, for it is clear that a large measure of the journal’s success is directly attributable to Thurber’s efforts. In fact, Thurber’s impact on The New Yorker was both monumental and immeasurable. Like his friend, colleague, and sometime co-author E.B. White, he joined the staff in the magazine’s formative period, in 1927, and as an active and longtime member of the editorial staff, he was a primary factor in determining the journal’s "style"—he even served as managing editor for a while.

The range of Thurber’s contributions to The New Yorker is considerable. In all he is credited with 365 signed items. These include poetry, "casuals" (the term applied by editor Harold W. Ross to prose pieces such as his parodies and fiction), half a dozen factual essays, several photographs, and two profiles (one of the most distinctive and distinguished features of the journal). Included in this mélange were "Famous Poems Illustrated," "Fables For Our Times," "Where Are They Now" (a seventeen-segment series in the mid-1930s reporting on famous people from the past such as Gertrude Ederly, A. Sumner Rowan, and Virginia O’Hanlan, and appearing over the pen name Jared Manley), "Onward and Upward with the Arts" (a six-part series dealing primarily with the role of soap operas in American society), and fifteen essays on "The Tennis Court," signed "Foot Fault," "T.J.G. ," or "Footfault." "Our Pet Department," a parody of advice columns, appeared in seven installments in 1930 and followed the typical question/answer format, accompanied by a drawing. For example, in one case a rendering of a dog lying on its back was matched with the following:

Q. I enclose a sketch of the way my dog, William, has been lying for two days now. I think there must be something wrong with him. Can you tell me how to get him out of this?

Mrs. L.L.G.

A. I should judge from the drawing that William is in a trance. Trance states, however, are rare with dogs. It may just be ecstasy. If at the end of another twenty-four hours he doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, you should give him up. The position of the ears leads me to believe that he may be enjoying himself in a quiet way, but the tail is somewhat alarming.

Ironically, though, the author had a great deal of difficulty in placing his first piece with the journal.

James Grover Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 1894, and he spent most of his youth there. When he left Ohio State University in 1918 without graduating—he could never pass a required botany class, as he explains in "University Days" ("College Days" in the original, September 23, 1933, p. 15) because of an eye injury suffered as a child, which, he notes in "Draft Board Nights" (September 30, 1933, p. 17), also kept him out of the military—it was to work as a code clerk in the United States Embassy in Paris. Upon returning to Columbus in 1920 he became a reporter on the Columbus Dispatch and wrote librettos for Ohio State musicals. He had previously written for his high school newspaper and for the Ohio State Lantern and the Sun-Dial, the university’s literary and humor magazines. In 1922 Thurber married Althea Adams who, together with his mother, served as a model for many of the traits attributed to his female characters, overbearing, domineering, secure, aggressive women.² Because of Althea’s urging, Thurber decided to try his hand at free-lance writing, and in 1924 he wrote "Josephine Has Her Day," a short story about a bull terrier that appeared in the Kansas City Star Sunday Magazine in 1926, the first piece of fiction for which he was paid. In the meantime, the Thurbers moved to France where he attempted, unsuccessfully, to write a novel. In September 1925 Thurber took a position as rewrite man for the Chicago Tribune’s Paris edition; three months later he was made the coeditor of the newspaper’s Riviera edition. However, he returned to New York early the following June where he became a reporter for the New York Evening Post. Still, he continued to write humorous fiction.

In The Years with Ross, Thurber records that he first heard of the newly inaugurated New Yorker in November 1925 when he read in the Paris Herald about the flap created among New York City’s high society by Ellin Mackay’s "Why We Go to Cabarets," the piece that may well have saved the two-month-old struggling journal. Back in New York he began sending short pieces to the New Yorker, but they "came back so fast I began to believe the New Yorker must have a rejection machine."³ Actually, he did sell one submission to the magazine, "Villanelle of Horatio Street, Manhattan," a poem published in the February 26, 1927, issue (p. 74). Finally, though, his wife convinced Thurber that the problem with his prose writing was that he labored too long over it. As he explains, he took appropriate steps:

One night I grimly set the alarm clock to ring in forty-five minutes and began writing a piece about a little man going round and round and round in a revolving door, attracting crowds and the police, setting a world’s record for this endurance event, winning fame and fortune. This burlesque of Channel swimming and the like ran to fewer than a thousand words, and was instantly bought by the New Yorker. For first time out of twenty tries I got a check instead of a rejection slip.⁴

"An American Romance," the 426-word result of Thurber’s forty-five minutes, appeared in The New Yorker on March 5, 1927 (pp. 63-64).

Unless the reader is aware of the author’s description of the piece as a "burlesque of Channel swimming," it is not likely that such a connection would be made. Significantly, the story contains several elements that were to become characteristics of the author’s writing. Foremost of these is the main character, identified simply as "the little man." While Thurber’s Little Man differs from those of his predecessors, as envisioned in the works of Robert Benchley and others, the hero of this story is clearly one of the genre. A meek, physically small man, he is badly dressed and has just had a "distressing scene" with his wife. He remains silent, going around in circles, while department store management and a policeman try to bully him and while a "specialist" tries to analyze him, to determine "if he had ever been in a cyclone and if he had ever had a severe shock while out walking." The little man persists in revolving for a total of four hours, at the end of which he receives $45,000 from a "big chewing gum magnate from the West" and more than $100,000 worth of vaudeville and motion picture offers. His explanation for accomplishing the feat is a cliché: "I did it for the wife and children."

The fact that Thurber wrote "An American Romance" at one short sitting was an anomaly. Normally, he spent enormous amounts of time perfecting his writing; many works remained unfinished for years. To some extent the writer’s commitment of time to his work helps to explain his success. Thurber’s style is, of course, his trademark. It is, above all, readable. Perhaps because his pieces are short, they hold a reader’s attention—and maybe, in spite of his several attempts to write a novel, one of which resulted in his spending "a thousand hours" on a 20,000-word book that went through between twenty and thirty rewrites over a period of two years yet was never published,⁵ he did not complete a novel because he could not sustain a reader’s interest over such a length. He was meticulous and precise in word choice so that his prose flows. It is relaxed and subtle, not at all harsh and haranguing. His remarkable memory allowed him to recall conversations exactly and thus realistically, and his attention to detail (which should have pleased editor Harold Ross immensely) gave his stories a further solid, realistic feel. As was true of other practitioners of basically journalistic humor, Thurber’s writing is paradoxical in that it contains the oral quality of the best yarn spinners of the nineteenth century while it simultaneously reflects an appreciation for the way that words appear on the printed page. The leisurely story-telling may be traced back to Henry James, who Thurber admits influenced his style, though the humorist also claims that he had to overcome that influence too.⁶ The second trait is evident in Thurber’s own writing, as in The Wonderful O (1957) or when he notes that the word "reason" is six-sevenths of the word "treason." Elsewhere he has commented, "I liked the shape of words and phrases, and I liked clean copy. I never turned in a page with a single mistake on it. I always copied it over. Naturally, when you copy you make changes and you improve

your copy."⁷

Interestingly, as Thurber’s career evolved, two major elements of his style developed in different directions, yet they were interrelated. His penchant for rewriting never diminished. Although occasionally pieces, such as "File and Forget" (January 8, 1949. p. 24), were dashed off in the course of one afternoon, even these exceptions were not the rarities that they seemed, according to Thurber. In an interview with George Plimpton and Max Steele he explained the "File and Forget" came easily "because it was a series of letters just as one would ordinarily dictate."⁸ Even then, he protested, the last letter took him a week—"It was the end of the piece and I had to fuss over it." He also recounted that his second wife, Helen, took a look at a first version of something that he had written and said, "Goddamn it, Thurber, that’s high school stuff!’ I have to tell her to wait until the seventh draft, it’ll work out all right. I don’t know why that should be so, that the first or second draft of everything I write reads as if it was turned out by a charwoman."⁹ It took Thurber about eight weeks and fifteen complete rewrites before he was satisfied with "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (March 18, 1939, pp. 19–20), which is approximately four thousand words long.

There seem to be two reasons for Thurber’s rewrites. To begin, he has said, "the whole purpose is to sketch out proportions. I rarely have a very clear idea of where I’m going when I start. Just people and/or a situation. Then I fool around—writing and rewriting—until the stuff jells."¹⁰ The second reason has to do with the author’s "constant attempt to make the finished version smooth, to make it seem effortless . . . with humor you have to look out for traps. You’re likely to be very gleeful with what you’ve first put down, and you think it’s fine, very funny. One reason you go over and over it is to make the piece sound less as if you were having a lot of fun with it yourself. You try to play it down."¹¹ As he grew increasing blind, Thurber relied on a secretary to do the mechanical transcribing of his work. By the time he became totally blind he was so skilled at rewriting and his memory was so accurate that he could compose a two thousand-word story in his mind at night and then edit it as he dictated it to his secretary the next morning.¹² While the loss of his sight obviously had little affect on his ability to polish, then, on the other hand there does seem to have been a reduction in the visual images incorporated in his stories that parallels his diminishing vision. In February 1927 Thurber actually became a New Yorker staff member. On board the Leviathan on the way to France several years earlier he had met E. B. "Andy" White’s sister. White was in charge of the magazine’s most important "The Talk of the Town" department, and he agreed to introduce Thurber to Ross, who thought that White and Thurber were old friends. Ross tended to hire anyone who walked into his office, frequently for the highest positions on the staff regardless of their backgrounds. A former newspaper man, he was impressed by Thurber’s

experience with the Columbus Dispatch, The Christian Science Monitor, the Wheeling, West Virginia Intelligencer, and the Chicago Tribune in Europe, and hired him on the spot as the journal’s managing editor. It took Thurber some time to demonstrate that he neither desired to be nor was capable of being a managing editor, but when Thurber extended a vacation to Columbus for two days in order to look for his lost dog, Ross realized that he had not chosen the right man for the job. Since a number of people, including Dorothy Parker, had told Ross that Thurber was a writer, the editor relegated his former executive to that position. Thurber remained a staff member until 1933.

Ross’s predilection for clarity, correctness, and detail was legendary. In fact, his admiration for H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage was the source of inspiration in Thurber’s amusing series of parodies, "Our Own Modern English Usage," which ran in nine installments between January 5 and December 21, 1929, and considered the use of who and whom, only, whether, which, the perfect infinitive, exclamation points and colons, the subjunctive mood, adverbial advice, and the split infinitive. The treatment of this last subject is particularly humorous. The essay begins, "Word has somehow got around that a split infinitive is always wrong. This is a piece with the sentimental and outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady," and contains sage observations on the order of "It is all but impossible to sit quietly by when someone is throwing salad plates."

Nevertheless, Ross and Thurber felt great affection for one another, and there can be no doubt that Ross’s tutelage was a major factor in developing the humorists precise but not prissy style.¹³ The other primary influence on Thurber’s style was E. B. White. No longer under the time pressures of newspaper writing, Thurber could take advantage of White’s guidance while writing segments of "The Talk of the Town."¹⁴ A simpler style emerged. As he told Plimpton and Steele, "After the seven years I spent in newspaper writing, it was more E. B. White who taught me about writing, how to clear up sloppy journalese. He was a strong influence, and for a long time in the beginning I thought he might be too much of one. But at least he got me away from a rather curious style I was starting to perfect—tight journalese laced with heavy doses of Henry James."¹⁵ Five years later Thurber repeated basically the same sentiment: "The precision and clarity of White’s writing slowed me down from the dogtrot of newspaper tempo and made me realize a writer turns on his mind, not a faucet."¹⁶

Turnabout is fair play, and it is obvious that Thurber embraced what has come to be called the "New Yorker style"—correct, clean, clear, urbane, and witty. In his editorial function he helped impose this style on other contributors, writers and cartoonists alike, a task that he recounts in The Years With Ross. Another New Yorker staff member, Brendon Gill (who did not like but did admire Thurber greatly), claims that

Thurber and White were "invaluable": "Between them, they had done more than anybody else to set the tone of The New Yorker.¹⁷ Again, it is impossible to measure Thurber’s contribution in this area, but it was a significant and lasting one.

Over the years Thurber’s fiction paralleled to some degree the events in his life. Most of these contributions to The New Yorker were published in the 1930s, and most of the earlier pieces were more light-hearted and innocent than those that were written during his marital difficulties with Althea (whom he divorced in June, 1935, to marry Helen Wismer a month later), during social upheavals such as World War II and the McCarthy Era (which he spoke out against on many occasions), and particularly during the bleak periods of physical illness and, in spite of numerous operations, advancing blindness which led to an emotional breakdown as well. The fiction that was produced during Thurber’s black periods is terrifying, bitter, cold, and harsh. Closely aligned with the side of Thurber that delighted in cruel practical jokes and the misery of others, many pieces like "The Cane in the Corridor" (January 2, 1943, pp. 21–22), a Poesque tale of a hospital visitor, cannot be classified as humorous by any definition.

His best work, however, was unsurpassed. And, amazingly enough, he wrote fine humorous fiction throughout his career. One of the humorist’s earlier New Yorker stories is also one of his best—"The Night the Bed Fell" from the summer 1933 series "My Life and Hard Times" (July 8, p. 11). Part of the semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional genre that Thurber excelled in, the piece describes a hilarious sequence of events and misunderstandings that purportedly took place one evening during the writer’s childhood in Columbus. The humor builds as each event in the series compounds what has gone before, and the events come faster and faster as the account proceeds. Only the "Vegetable Man" sequence in the W. C. Fields’s film It’s a Gift the following year can compare in the building of incidents to a comic climax. The genre to which "The Night the Bed Fell" belongs is an interesting one, and it reveals something of Thurber’s nature besides. The tales convey a sense of nostalgia as the author reminisces about family life in a quieter, simpler, purer time and place. The incidents are recounted calmly, but a sense of immediacy, of actually being present and observing the action, is pervasive. The tone is of fond remembrance, even when the happenings portrayed caused discomfort when they occurred, as when the commander of the university ROTC cadet corps berated him for being "the main trouble with this university!"¹⁸ The persona adopted by Thurber as narrator reflects the tone and themes of these pieces, too. It is not quite the Little Man, but there is a kinship. The narrator is usually somewhat heroic and at the same time the butt of the humor. He is not the cowed individual of many of Thurber’s other pieces; he is comparatively bright and competent. Perhaps this is because the narrator is closer to the real Thurber,

who was fairly unflappable; perhaps it is because the memoirs seldom dwell on the battle of the sexes, and there is no overpowering female figure to contrast with the narrator, to expose the depths of his inadequacies, and to revel in his awareness of his failings.

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is one of the best known and most popular short stories in American literature. When it was printed it aroused more reaction than anything else ever published in The New Yorker—which, considering the brouhaha over Shirley Jackson’s "The Lottery" and the fact that John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Rachael Carson’s The Silent Spring appeared in the journal, is intriguing in itself. The tale is a classic fantasy in which the Little Man husband, Mitty, escapes from the realities of his mundane world by imagining himself performing heroic deeds in a variety of romantic situations. According to the writer, he was trying to "treat the remarkable as commonplace"¹⁹ in this piece. To paraphrase Alexander Pope, this approach to his material, and its obverse, was at the center of a great deal of his humor.

Interestingly, Thurber and The New Yorker became involved in legal difficulties several times, and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" figured in one of them. Charles Yale Harrison wrote Thurber a letter suggesting that "Mitty" had been inspired by his own novel, Meet Me on the Barricades (1938). Harrison believed that Thurber had read his book, been the victim of a "psychological deep freeze,"²⁰ and unconsciously plagiarized the work. Through the journal’s attorneys Thurber replied that he had been in Europe when Harrison’s book was published and had read neither the novel nor any reviews of it. Moreover, Thurber had used a similar title previously ("The Private Life of Mr. Bidwell," January 28, 1933, p. 12) and it was pointed out that he had also written stories about daydreamers before, "Mr. Pendly and the Poindexter" (February 27, 1932, p. 13) being a prime example. Harrison was unsatisfied, Thurber refused to submit the case to an arbitration board of authors, and the issue finally just petered out.

A similar accusation was brought against Thurber by the authors of a mystery novel that parodied Shakespeare’s Macbeth. They claimed that "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" (October 2, 1937, pp. 16–17)²¹ was inspired by their book. Fortunately, it was discovered that Thurber’s casual had been written and submitted before the novel had appeared on the stands. One legal entanglement, however, went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and resulted in what amounted to a landmark decision. A segment of the "Where Are They Now" series dealing with William James Sidis (August 14, 1937, p. 22) for which Thurber claims to have been the rewrite man (although The New Yorker officially listed the article under his name in its files), became the center of a "right-of-privacy" case. Sidis, who had been out of the public eye for some time, filed suit on two counts of breach of the right of privacy and on one count for libel. While the court found for the plaintiff in the libel

suit, it declared that someone who had once been a public figure would always be considered a public figure. If this were not true, the court reasoned, the authors and publishers of newspapers, magazines, books, and encyclopedias would be subject to constant lawsuits. The Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Federal Court, and when the Supreme Court refused to review the case three years later, the original ruling stood.

As indicated above, even some of Thurber’s later casuals reflect the sustained craftsmanship and humor of his early and middle periods. "Midnight at Tim’s Place (November 29, 1958, p. 46), for instance, is a tightly written piece about a conversation in a bar. As light and well paced as his stories from thirty years previously, this tale is about a young couple who intrude upon the narrator and his wife to involve them in a domestic quarrel. During the evening the young husband recounts an audience he recently had with his old philosophy professor. The young man, suffering from depression, sought enlightenment only to be dismayed at finding the professor wearing two hats. When this detail is revealed, there is a long pause. "In his study?" the narrator asks incredulously. The timing and incongruity of the narrator’s response is pure Thurber. There are two possible implied concepts underlying the question: either it is completely unrelated to the event described and humor comes from the suddenness and incongruity, or it implies that wearing two hats is acceptable, although not, perhaps, in the study, an amusing thought. In either case the narrator’s reaction is the focus of the humor. Thurber then takes his story a step further, though; the narrator’s wife, in her realistic fashion is seized by the thought of the number of hats involved. Once more the Little Man and the Thurber Woman are present. The piece also contains the puns, literary allusions, and foreign phrases (see "Department of Correction: Re-Latin phrase in ‘Midnight at Tim’s Place,’" February 7, 1959, p. 77) that Thurber enjoyed using.

The last Thurber casual to appear in The New Yorker was "The Manic in the Moon" (August 19, 1961, pp. 22-24). Barely three months after this publication the author was dead. Fittingly, given his love of and care in choosing words, his final piece was a humorous expression of concern about language, in this instance a prediction that man’s exploration of space will cause certain idiomatic phrases such as "down to earth" and "earth goddess" to lose their poetic connotations. The subject of language fascinated Thurber throughout his career, and a number of pieces in his canon focus on it. "What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?" published twenty-two years earlier (January 7, 1939, pp. 14–15), is one of the best-known. The writer’s allusion to Lewis Carroll in this title is suitable, for in the essay he describes how a failure to communicate with his maid, Della, was brought about by dialectical differences. Taken aback by her announcement that someone was there with the "reeves," which the narrator determined were either strings of onions, administrative officers, pens for cattle, poultry, or pigs, or females of the common European

sandpiper (the American Heritage Dictionary provides different definitions), it was some time before he realized that "reeves" is her pronunciation of the word "wreaths," as in Christmas wreaths.

Many critics have discussed Thurber’s style and themes .²² Richard C. Tobias, for example, has written about the humorist’s use of comic masks to explore common twentieth-century American subjects in his first efforts, how he uses conventional, social and literary types later, and how he develops old comic plots in new ways.²³ Like his colleagues White and S. J. Perelman, Thurber loved language—the way it sounds, the way it is used to mean something. His style depends on his precise usage, and much of his humor is based on an application of the literal meaning of words. Some of the techniques that Thurber employed have been touched on above—puns, artistic allusions, an exquisite sense of timing, so forth. He also used both hyperbole and understatement, frequently emphasizing a point by juxtaposing these devices. He was also fond of reversal and other ironic forms. Typically, Thurber’s settings, circumstances, and characters were normal, conventional middle-class American. Among his greatest talents was the ability to take these elements and to emphasize one or two minor details in his description to create an indelible image of the situation.

Thematically, Thurber touched up on all aspects of society, from language to love and from art to war. Often he was more politically oriented than most of his humorist contemporaries. His favorite topic was the exploitation and mistreatment of the Little Man by women (a subject explored by Norris W. Yates²⁴), creatures that he posited may have diverged from man’s evolutionary path and thus actually belong to another race. The exploits of Mr. and Mrs. Monroe are representative. Machines also were a source of the Little Man’s downfall. Observing many of the incidents depicted in his short stories and especially prevalent in his cartoons, were dogs — independent, objective observers who see through pretense and bravado to vulnerability, yet who wisely seldom offer comments.

Thurber’s 307 drawings, most of which were cartoons, brought him almost as much fame as his prose did, though the first attempts to place his art work in the New Yorker were as inauspicious as had been the efforts with his short stories. Accuracy, in art as in prose, was one of Ross’s hobbyhorses. In 1947 he was so concerned with the details of torpedo tubes and a windshield—shown on a P.T. boat drawn by Charles Addams—that he insisted on getting confirmation from the craft’s manufacturer. Thurber also ran into Ross’s commitment to accuracy in the area of art. The first Thurber line drawing to be formally submitted to The New Yorker was not even submitted by its creator; E. B. White had long been an admirer of Thurber’s sketches, and unbeknownst to his colleague, White presented to the art staff a picture of a seal looking at some black dots in a barren landscape and announcing, "Hm, explorers!"

that Thurber had drawn in 1929 and which White had inked in. The sketch was returned with the notation, "This is how a seal’s whiskers grow," along with another artist’s depiction of a seal as an illustration. White resubmitted the drawing with his own comment: "This is how a Thurber seal’s whiskers grow." In spite of his staff’s approval of the piece, Ross again rejected it. Some months later Harper’s published Thurber and White’s collaboration, Is Sex Necessary? (1929), complete with Thurber’s illustrations, which White had collected and insisted on having included. After the book became a best seller, Ross agreed to publish Thurber’s work. It had taken Thurber two years to gain Ross’s acceptance, and in 1931 he was paid $40 for his first published effort. The cartoons soon became popular, and it was not long before Thurber was receiving $100 each for his drawings, many of which reflected the view of life that occupied his attention in his prose. Amusingly, on several occasions when his cartoons were rejected, Thurber merely forged Ross’s initials and the drawings were published. One of the most famous is a rendering, published in January, 1932, of a man and a woman in bed, with a seal looking over the headboard behind them. The woman is saying: "All Right, Have It your Way—You Heard a Seal Bark!"

Thurber’s whimsy comes through in a cartoon in which a man in a top hat and overcoat, who is obviously coming home late, is holding a rabbit by its ears and facing an irate wife, whom he greets with the words, "Darling, I Seem to Have This Rabbit." In another drawing a startled man in the witness chair next to the judge’s bench is confronted by an attorney pointing at a kangaroo and exclaiming, "Perhaps This Will Refresh Your Memory!" In what Thurber calls the war between men and women, a cartoon depicts a man sitting at a table with a heavyset woman who glares at him while a younger woman sitting across from him presses his foot with hers over the caption, "Well, What’s Come Over You Suddenly?" Elsewhere, a wife, lying on a divan and speaking on the telephone while her husband watches from a nearby chair, demands, "Well, if I Called the Wrong Number, Why Did You Answer the Phone?" And, if man cannot understand woman’s logic, neither does he understand either her relationship to the universe or her emotions and sensitivity. For instance, a couple walking in one cartoon is about to be engulfed by a giant being surrounded by black and speeding toward them from space as the man says, "You and Your Premonitions!" while in another the woman in bed snarls "Well, it Makes a Difference to Me!" at the man standing next to the bed and dressed in pajama tops decorated with spots and bottoms with a stripe pattern.

In 1951 T. S. Eliot commented about Thurber’s writing, "It is a form of humor which is also a way of saying something serious. There is a criticism of life at the bottom of it. It is serious and even somber. Unlike so much humor, it is not merely a criticism of manners—that is, of the superficial aspects of society at a given moment—but something more

profound. His writings and also his illustrations are capable of surviving the immediate environment and time out of which they spring. To some extent they will be a document of the age they belong to."²⁵ This assessment of Thurber’s art corresponds with the humorist’s artistic theories. In addition, it may also suggest why Thurber and The New Yorker were so well matched, for Thurber’s theories also fit well with Ross’s stated rationale for the magazine.

In "The Case for Comedy," an article published in the Atlantic Monthly,²⁶ Thurber declares that "The decline of humor and comedy in our time has a multiplicity of causes, a principal one being the ideological beating they have taken from both the intellectual life and the political right." As a result, he says, "only tragedy is (considered) serious and has importance." But, "the truth is that comedy is just as important, and often more serious in its approach to truth, and, what few writers seem to realize or to admit, usually more difficult to write." Ross had pronounced, in The New Yorker’s prospectus, that the magazine "will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit, and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or highbrow. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated. . . . It will hate bunk." In his editorial statement in the premiere issue of the magazine, Ross proclaimed that The New Yorker would have "a serious purpose but . . . will not be too serious in executing it."

Thurber told Plimpton and Steele that "the act of writing is something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even rewriting’s fun."²⁷ (Parenthetically, he did not consider himself an artist, because he did his cartoons "for relaxation, and . . . I do them too fast for them to be called art."²⁸). Moreover, in "the Case for Comedy," he had concluded, "As brevity is the soul of wit, form, it seems to me, is the heart of humor and the salvation of comedy." He had not trouble following Ross’s admonition to "Use the rapier, not the bludgeon." However, in "Preface to a Life," which was added to the book version of My Life and Hard Times, Thurber described himself as a professional writer thus:

A writer verging into the middle years lives in a dread of losing his way to the publishing house and wandering down to the Bowery or the Battery, there to disappear like Ambrose Bierce. He has sometimes also the kindred dread of turning a sudden corner and meeting himself sauntering along in the opposite direction. I have known writers at this dangerous and tricky age to phone their homes from their offices, or their offices from their homes, ask for themselves in a low tone, and then, having fortunately discovered that they were "out," to collapse in hard-breathing relief. This is particularly true of writers of light pieces running from a thousand to two thousand words.

The notion that such persons are gay of heart and carefree is curiously untrue. They lead, as a matter of fact, an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.

 

Afraid of losing themselves in the larger flight of the two-volume novel, or even the one-volume novel, they stick to short accounts of their misadventures because they never get so deep into them but that they feel they can get out. This type of writing is not a joyous form of self-expression but the manifestation of a twitchiness at once cosmic and mundane.²⁹

During the thirty-four years of his association with The New Yorker, which was essentially his whole writing career, both Thurber and the journal profited. Over this period he honed his style, a style that fortuitously coincided with, exemplified, and established the magazine’s characteristic style. He was encouraged to write humor about what has been described as "that line of tension where chaos and order meet," producing some of the finest humorous prose in his country’s history. He also was extremely instrumental in developing the notable tenor of one of America’s most important and successful journals. Ultimately, perhaps, the relationship between James Thurber and The New Yorker is best summarized by Thurber’s contention, stated in an exchange of letters with Ross: "The New Yorker is the only magazine for which a man can write with dignity and tranquility."

    ¹Over the years a number of articles have demonstrated this and explored some of the reasons for the magazine’s phenomenal success. The most recent essay on The New Yorker’s literary content that examines the figures and other factors cited in reaching this conclusion is my "The New Yorker" in American Comic Journals and Newspapers, ed. David E. E. Sloane (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985). In addition, and for comparative purposes, it is interesting to note that The New Yorker has been in existence for sixty years. Several early imitators failed within a year or two of their creation. The longest running humor magazines still being published include The Dartmouth Jack-O’Lantern (founded in 1909), the Harvard Lampoon (founded in 1876), and The Princeton Tiger (founded in 1882), which are longer running, but which have never achieved either the acclaim or the level of circulation of The New Yorker. Judge (1881–1939; 1939–1949), the old Life (1883–1936), Sunny South (1805–1807; superseded by Uncle Remus’s Home Magazine, with later title changes, 1808–1913), the old Time (which later merged with Munsey’s Magazine, 1884–1929), and the Yale Record (1872–1969) also had long runs, and complete the ten longest runs list.
   ²Burton Bernstein’s Thurber: A Biography (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), contains ample evidence for this contention.
   ³James Thurber, The Years with Ross (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), p. 33.
   ⁴Ibid., p. 36.
   ⁵See Robert E. Morseberger, James Thurber (New York: Twayne, 1964), pp. 179–80.
   ⁶See the interview with George Plimpton and Max Steele, "The Art of Fiction," The Paris Review, X (Fall, 1955); reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (New York: Viking-Compass, 1959) ed. Malcolm Cowley, pp. 92–93.
   ⁷Quoted in Morseberger, p. 182.
   ⁸Plimpton and Steele, p. 88.
   ⁹Ibid.
   ¹⁰Quoted in Morseberger, p. 179.
   ¹¹Plimpton and Steele, p. 88.
   ¹²W. J. Weatherby, "A Man of Words," The Manchester Guardian Weekly (February 9, 1961), p. 13.

     ¹³Besides evidence to this effect presented throughout The Years with Ross, further confirmation of Thurber’s conscious appreciation of this fact appears in Selected Letters of James Thurber, ed. Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981).
   ¹⁴In addition to The Years with Ross and Selected Letters, see Letters of E. B. White (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), ed. Dorothy Lobrano Guth.
   ¹⁵Plimpton and Steele, p. 92.16.
   ¹⁶"Jim," Newsweek, LVIII (November 13, 1961), pp. 35–36.
   ¹⁷Brendon Gill, Here at The New Yorker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 287.
     ¹⁸Thurber, "University Days," In The Thurber Carnival (New York: Harper, 1945), p. 227.
   ¹⁹Plimpton and Steele, p. 96.
   ²⁰Thurber, The Years with Ross, p. 208.
   ²¹In The Years with Ross, p. 209, Thurber mistakenly remembers writing the casual in 1938, a year after it appeared in the magazine.
   ²²Besides the numerous articles written about Thurber, and the scholarly works cited above, others who have written about the humorist’s work include Stephen A. Black (James Thurber: His Masquerades. The Hague: Mouton, 1970), Walter Blair (Horse Sense in American Humor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943); Native American Humor. San Francisco, 1760; and with Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford, 1978.), Max Eastman (Enjoyment of Laughter. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), and Charles S. Holmes (ed., Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974; and The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber. New York: Atheneum, 1972). Edwin T. Bowden’s James Thurber: A Bibliography (Columbus: Ohio State, 1968) is the standard bibliography of Thurber’s writings.
   ²³The Art of James Thurber (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969).
   ²⁴The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1964), particularly pp. 219–228 and 275–298.
   ²⁵Quoted in "Priceless Gift of Laughter," Time, LVII (July 9, 1951), p. 88.
   ²⁶Reprinted in Lanterns and Lances (New York: Harper, 1961), pp. 140-148.
   ²⁷Plimpton and Steele, p. 89.
   ²⁸Ibid.
   ²⁹New York: Harper, 1933, p. 10.