In February 1927 Thurber met
E. B. White at a party in Greenwich village. White was working at
The New Yorker, and helped Thurber to get hired there. He began as an editor, with long hours, often seven days a week, with very little time for writing.
Harold Ross, the editor-in-chief, agreed to "demote" him (as Thurber put it) to a writer instead of an editor late that year. Thurber had produced a handful of short pieces even while working as an editor, and became a mainstay of the magazine once he gave up editorial duties. One of his first sales in this period was "Menaces in May", a short story—not a humorous piece—with heavily autobiographical elements. The protagonist, whose sophisticated wife, Lydia, is away from home, meets an old flame who is married. The protagonist wonders what his life would have been like with her, and later blames Lydia for the dull state of his life. The old flame was based on Eva Prout. This was following by a series of humorous pieces about a Mr. Monroe and his efficient, sophisticated, emasculating wife; each episode was based on something that had happened between James and Althea. The Thurber's marriage was still in difficulties; by the time Thurber was hired by
The New Yorker Althea was sleeping with other men, without concealing her affairs from James, and at one point Althea went to Europe without James for two months. In 1929 they agreed to begin living more separate lives: they rented a house in
Silvermine, Connecticut, and Althea stayed there; James spent most of his time in Manhattan, visiting Silvermine occasionally. White shared an office with Thurber, and soon became a fan of Thurber's rapidly sketched pencil drawings. In 1929 he picked up a discarded cartoon of Thurber's, of a seal seeing explorers in the distance. He inked in the faint pencil lines and submitted it to the weekly art meeting. It was rejected with a note from the art director saying "This is the way a seal's whiskers go"; White resubmitted it with a note saying "This is the way a Thurber seal's whiskers go", but it was rejected again. At about the same time White and Thurber discovered that they were both working on parodies of serious psychological books about sex. They decided to combine their efforts, writing alternate chapters, and White asked Thurber to create the illustrations. They took the manuscript and drawings to
Harper, who had recently published a book of White's. The editor assumed that Thurber's simple sketches were just outlines of the planned final artwork, but White told them "No ... these are the drawings themselves". The book, titled
Is Sex Necessary? came out that November, and was very successful, selling fifty thousand copies in its first year in print. Ross had been surprised to discover that Thurber's drawings were popular, and in 1930 began printing his artwork, in a series of parodies of advice columns about readers' pets. These were collected in 1931 in Thurber's second book,
The Owl in the Attic, which also included the Monroe stories and a series of articles that had appeared in
The New Yorker parodying
H. W. Fowler's
Modern English Usage, which had become Ross's favorite style guide. Ross asked Thurber for the seal cartoon, but it had been discarded. Thurber attempted to recreate it, but as he drew it he realized the rock on which the seal sat looked like the headboard of a bed, so he added a couple in bed beneath the headboard, with the caption "All Right, Have It Your Way—You Heard a Seal Bark!" The cartoon appeared in
The New Yorker in 1932, in the January 30 issue, and became "one of the most celebrated and often-reprinted cartoons of the twentieth century", in Bernstein's words. In 1931, Althea moved back to Manhattan, and for a short time the marriage seemed healthy, but after a few weeks, James decided to leave Althea and live with
Paula Trueman, an actress he had a relationship with. Althea told James she was pregnant, and they agreed to stay together. Their daughter, Rosemary, was born in Manhattan on October 7, 1931.
Divorce and remarriage After the success of the first two books, Harper arranged to publish a collection of Thurber's art, titled
The Seal in the Bedroom. Forty-seven of the drawings included had already appeared in
The New Yorker, and Thurber quickly drew another thirty-eight to fill out the book. It appeared in November 1932 and sold well. Among the pieces Thurber wrote for
The New Yorker was a series about his life in Columbus; these were published in November 1933 in book form, titled
My Life and Hard Times. The reviews were positive; the book became a bestseller, and is generally regarded as Thurber's best work. In 1934 he began a series of radio broadcasts on
WABC, filling in for
Alexander Woollcott, another
New Yorker writer who was in hospital. His art began to receive serious critical attention: in 1933 drawings by Thurber and
George Grosz were shown at
Smith College, and in 1934 there was a Thurber show at the
Valentine Gallery in Manhattan. He also drew many cartoons on the walls of a bar named Costello's on Third Avenue. When the bar relocated to 49th Street in 1949, the walls with his cartoons were carefully moved to the new location to preserve them. By this time the Thurbers' marriage was foundering again: they agreed that Althea would stay in Sandy Hook, and James would live in Manhattan and occasionally visit. Thurber began to drink more in the wake of his success, and had affairs, one of which was with Helen Wismer, whom he had met in 1930 and dated occasionally since then. In late 1934 Althea filed for divorce. James was surprised, but cooperative, arranging financial support for Althea, giving her the Sandy Hook property, and agreeing a visitation plan for Rosemary. At the time of the divorce, Thurber had heard that Ann Honeycutt, one of the women he had been closest to over the previous few years, was getting married. The day after the divorce Thurber met Helen Wismer for a date, and asked her to marry him. She agreed, acknowledging later that it was "on the rebound" from the relationship with Honeycutt, and they were married on June 25, 1935. They had little money, and honeymooned on
Martha's Vineyard in a cottage with no water or power. In October the Thurbers moved back to an apartment in Manhattan, and for a few months kept up a hectic schedule; James would work all night, stop at the
New Yorker offices during the day, and spend the evening in bars; he and Helen would host parties at the apartment or visit others. In November Harper brought out Thurber's
The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, which collected pieces from
The New Yorker with some additional drawings; again it was a success, with four printings that year. He began a series of non-fiction profiles in
The New Yorker under the title "Where Are They Now?"' that ran for two years, published under the pseudonym "Jared L. Manley". The subjects included one-time New York governor
William Sulzer,
Willie Stevens, one of the suspects in a notorious murder case, and
Virginia O'Hanlon, famous for writing the letter that led to the "
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" newspaper column. By March 1936 the pace of the Thurbers' life began to tell on them, and they spent two months in Bermuda, relaxing, though Thurber continued to work. Returning to New York in May, they decided to make a change to a less frenetic lifestyle, and began planning a move to Connecticut. They rented a house in
Litchfield for the winter of 1936–1937. By the turn of the year Thurber's eye was starting to lose vision; he had a
cataract, and was warned by his opthalmologist that he would have to have an operation. The Thurbers went to Europe that May, delaying the eye operation; they toured France, and then visited London, where the
Storran Gallery was putting on a one-man show of Thurber's artwork. Enough of the art sold that the Thurbers were able to rent a flat and stay in London until August; while there James became good friends with the architect
John Duncan Miller. Trips to Wales and Scotland were followed by a return to London in September, then to Holland, Paris, and down to the Riviera in November to escape the Parisian winter. In early 1938 they drove to London, via Paris, and stayed in
Piccadilly. Thurber was a celebrity in London;
Hamish Hamilton were planning a collection of his work, to be called
Cream of Thurber, and he was popular socially. They were enjoying London, but rumors of war were growing, and in August they left for the US.
Return from Europe The Thurbers arrived in New York in September 1938. They rented a house in
Woodbury, Connecticut, and Thurber spent some time with his daughter Rosemary, whom he had not seen in over a year. Thurber's vision had deteriorated further while he was in Europe; he was still driving during the daytime, but on one trip with Helen had to stop and change drivers when he could not see well enough to continue. He was busy, contributing art to books by several friends and connections, and thinking about a play he wanted to write. He began a series of fables for
The New Yorker and a series of illustrations for famous poems such as "Barbara Frietchie" by
John Greenleaf Whittier, and
Henry Wadworth Longfellow's "
Excelsior". In the winter of 1938–1939 he wrote "
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"; the story was published in the March 18, 1939 issue of
The New Yorker, and was an immediate success. In early 1939 Elliott Nugent, his old college friend, who was now a well-known figure in Hollywood, became interested in Thurber's play outline, and Thurber decided to move to California and try a collaboration. They went by boat, via the
Panama Canal, and the brilliant sun made Thurber's vision problems worse; by the time they arrived he was unable to read at all.
The Male Animal After a couple of weeks Thurber's vision settled down and he was able to read and type. The Thurbers stayed in California for four months, by the end of which the play, titled
The Male Animal, was more or less completed. The play's theme was academic freedom, with the central device the question of whether a professor at a Midwestern University was be allowed to read a letter from the anarchist
Bartolomeo Vanzetti to his English composition class. Nugent arranged for tryouts and then rehearsals in California, while the Thurbers returned east by train, with James planning to bring in some much-needed income by returning to his usual writing and drawing. Shortly after returning to New York he had a complete book sketched out: a parable about a future World War, told in the format of a picture book. He showed it to Harper, who had been planning to publish a collection of his fables in time for Christmas, and they agreed to replace
Fables For Our Time with the new book, titled
The Last Flower. He returned to California for
The Male Animal's opening night in San Diego on October 16, 1939; it was well-received for the two nights it ran, and Thurber and Nugent worked on changes over the following week, until it opened in Los Angeles. It closed after a week, and its future was uncertain. Meanwhile, in November,
The Last Flower appeared, to very positive reviews. Nugent came to New York and he and Thurber completely revised the play, and persuaded
Herman Shumlin to produce and direct it. It opened in New York on January 9, 1940, with
Ruth Matteson, Matt Briggs, and
Gene Tierney in the leading roles. The show was a hit; it stayed in New York until mid-year, then moved to Chicago, and finally went on the road until early 1941. The money from royalties and film rights meant that the Thurbers no longer had any financial worries, but they both had health issues: Helen had anemia, and James had another incident with his eyesight.
Eye operations and depression A cataract operation, in June 1940, improved Thurber's sight for a while, and he started a series of columns for
PM, a New York newspaper, that ran from September 1940 to July 1941. Another operation in October 1940 was necessary, for
glaucoma and
iritis, but it was unsuccessful; Thurber was in hospital for a month, still in pain and with very little vision. Three more operations followed in the next six months, but by May 1941 he was legally blind—he now had to write longhand with plenty of space between the words, as he could not read what he had just written; Helen typed up these drafts for him. They moved to a house on Martha's Vineyard for the summer. Two stories he wrote for
The New Yorker in this period are among his darkest: in "The Whip-Poor-Will" the protagonist goes mad and murders his wife and servants before killing himself. "The Cane in the Corridor" is a story inspired by a friend's refusal to visit Thurber in hospital; the story's hero attempts to take revenge for a friend's failure to visit him. At the same time he worked on a children's book titled
Many Moons; it would not be illustrated by Thurber, because of his vision problems. Once
Many Moons was done Thurber's mental state deteriorated dramatically. He insisted they move in with friends of theirs on Martha's Vineyard, saying he needed to be around other people, but it did not help: he was depressed, drinking too much, antisocial, and worried about his health. He "went into a tailspin, crashed, and burst into flames" for four weeks, as he put it in a late August letter to his surgeon. By that time he was improving, thanks to Ruth Fox, a local doctor who specialized in alcoholism and treated him with shots of vitamin B1. While recuperating, Thurber met
Mark Van Doren, and they become lifelong friends. The Thurbers left Martha's Vineyard in September, and left the manuscript of
Many Moons behind; it was found the following year and published in 1943. The Thurbers decided to stay in New York while James continued his recovery. He met with a psychiatrist who quickly decided that he needed no treatment, which calmed his fears that he was falling into clinical insanity. He started to write again, via dictation, and sent caption ideas to Ross for consideration; and he managed a few rough drawings, which the New Yorker's art staff inked in. Over the winter of 1941–1942 he had an affair with a secretary, but as he could not drive he had to rely on the
New Yorker office boy to chauffeur him; this was the young
Truman Capote, then eighteen years old. In March 1942
the film version of The Male Animal premiered in Columbus, and Thurber spent several days at the festivities as a hometown celebrity. The film, which starred
Henry Fonda and
Olivia de Havilland, was a great success.
1942–1945: Blindness and more commercial success Back in New York he was advised by Dr. Fox to move out of the city, and the Thurbers rented a house in
Cornwall, Connecticut, near the Van Dorens. While in Cornwall Thurber wrote "
The Catbird Seat", one of his best-known stories, and the positive reception it received helped restore his confidence. That October
My World—And Welcome to It was published; this was a collection of his recent pieces, and it too was a success. He and Helen had hoped to stay in Cornwall over the winter of 1942–1943, but the fuel oil they needed to heat the house was unavailable because of wartime rationing, so they returned to New York in January. With the aid of a
Zeiss loupe, a helmet-mounted magnifying device, he began to draw again on large paper in bright light; he was limited to ten minutes a day because of the strain on his eyes, but it enabled him to produce more drawings. They spent the summer of 1943 in Cornwall again, and two more Thurber books were published that year:
Many Moons finally appeared, followed by
Men, Women and Dogs, a collection of drawings which included many of his most famous cartoons and a series of drawings chronicling "The War Between Men and Women". It quickly sold out and went into a second printing. The following year he published another children's book,
The Great Quillow, in which Quillow, a village toymaker, defeats a giant named Hunder. Hunder was a straightforward allegory for
Adolf Hitler, and Quillow, as drawn by the book's illustrator,
Doris Lee, looked rather like Thurber. That year they summered near
Geneva, New York, instead of Cornwall, and Thurber became seriously ill with pneumonia there, recovering after getting sulfa drugs from a nearby Naval Training Station. He relapsed after he returned to New York, and was hospitalized for three weeks. In November, after he had recovered, they went to Hot Springs in Virginia for a vacation, and he had to be hospitalized again, this time for
peritonitis caused by a
ruptured appendix. By mid-December 1944 he was well enough to return to New York, where he gradually regained his health.
The Thurber Carnival, an anthology of Thurber's work that included a handful of uncollected pieces such as "The Catbird Seat", appeared in early 1945 to rapturous reviews. It was a
Book-of-the-Month selection for February, which meant a print run of 375,000 copies beyond the publisher's initial run of 50,000. He was still able to draw, and produced a series of drawings for
The New Yorker that pretended to illustrate phrases, such as "A Hopeless Quandary"—a horse, weeping, on a hill under a lonely star. Another fairy tale,
The White Deer, was published that year: it was full of wordplay and literary allusions, and Thurber did not consider it to be a book for young children, commenting later that no child was likely to understand all the references in it.
Postwar years in Cornwall, Connecticut The money from
The Thurber Carnival enabled the Thurbers to buy a house in Cornwall, not far from their rental, which they referred to as "The Great Good Place". Thurber became part of a small group of artists and writers who lived or summered there, including Van Doren,
Armin Landeck, and
Marc Simont. Thurber had long been prone to unpleasant behaviour at night, when drinking, and Cornwall was no exception: he goaded and needled almost all his acquaintances there, most of whom put up with him "only because he was blind and famous", as one of them later said. He also had affairs; when one became serious enough for the woman to boast to Helen that she could have James whenever she wanted, Helen replied, "What will you do with him? He's blind, clumsy, and he needs constant help." In 1944 Thurber had sold the film rights for "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" to
Samuel Goldwyn. The script was developed without Thurber's involvement, and with
Danny Kaye as the proposed lead. Thurber reviewed the script at the end of 1945, and was dismayed; he suggested numerous changes, but few of them were adopted.
The film appeared in August 1947, and both Goldwyn and Thurber wrote letters to
Life magazine giving their opposing opinions of the result. Goldwyn also owned the rights to "The Catbird Seat", but Thurber was able to recover them; a film was eventually made of the story in the UK in 1959, titled
The Battle of the Sexes and starring
Peter Sellers. Thurber was productive in the late 1940s, despite his vision handicaps, but his drawing days were over: his last original cartoon for
The New Yorker appeared in 1947. He wrote a series of five articles about radio soap operas for
The New Yorker and his humorous pieces continued to appear there as well, along with the occasional short story.
The Beast in Me, a collection of his short pieces and cartoons, appeared in late 1948; it did not sell nearly as well as
The Thurber Carnival. In 1950 Helen was hospitalized for a
hysterectomy, and soon afterwards she and James went to Bermuda to relax and recover. While in Bermuda he wrote another fairy tale,
The 13 Clocks. It was illustrated by Simont, appeared in November 1950, and was adapted for television in 1953. == Later life ==