James (Grover) Thurber, 1894 - 1961

Humorist James (Grover) Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio (1894)—a comic writer with an angry underbite. In 1927 he met E.B. White at a party and talked his way onto the staff of The New Yorker, which he influenced with his anecdotes, stories, and line sketches of predatory women, timid men and unlikely animals, mostly canine. He created the classic daydreaming hero in his story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1947), and ridiculed psychoanalysis in a book written with E.B. White, Is Sex Necessary? (1929). Thurber, who went blind in mid-life, recalled his New Yorker career in a memoir, The Years With Ross(1959). He also wrote the children's books The 13 Clocks (1950) and The Wonderful O (1957).