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The Thurber album : a collection of pieces about people
The Thurber Collection deals with pieces on the author's family, friends, teachers, and colleagues in Columbus, Ohio, in the good old days of carriages and tranquillity. Most of the stories first appeared in The New Yorker magazine.
316 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1952
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About the author
James Thurber
356 books608 followersThurber was born in Columbus, Ohio to Charles L. Thurber and Mary Agnes (Mame) Fisher Thurber. Both of his parents greatly influenced his work. His father, a sporadically employed clerk and minor politician who dreamed of being a lawyer or an actor, is said to have been the inspiration for the small, timid protagonist typical of many of his stories. Thurber described his mother as a "born comedienne" and "one of the finest comic talents I think I have ever known." She was a practical joker, on one occasion pretending to be crippled and attending a faith healer revival, only to jump up and proclaim herself healed.
Thurber had two brothers, William and Robert. Once, while playing a game of William Tell, his brother William shot James in the eye with an arrow. Because of the lack of medical technology, Thurber lost his eye. This injury would later cause him to be almost entirely blind. During his childhood he was unable to participate in sports and activities because of his injury, and instead developed a creative imagination, which he shared in his writings.
From 1913 to 1918, Thurber attended The Ohio State University, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. He never graduated from the University because his poor eyesight prevented him from taking a mandatory ROTC course. In 1995 he was posthumously awarded a degree.
From 1918 to 1920, at the close of World War I, Thurber worked as a code clerk for the Department of State, first in Washington, D.C. and then at the American Embassy in Paris, France. After this Thurber returned to Columbus, where he began his writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch from 1921 to 1924. During part of this time, he reviewed current books, films, and plays in a weekly column called "Credos and Curios," a title that later would be given to a posthumous collection of his work. Thurber also returned to Paris in this period, where he wrote for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.
In 1925, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, getting a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Post. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1927 as an editor with the help of his friend and fellow New Yorker contributor, E.B. White. His career as a cartoonist began in 1930 when White found some of Thurber's drawings in a trash can and submitted them for publication. Thurber would contribute both his writings and his drawings to The New Yorker until the 1950s.
Thurber was married twice. In 1922, Thurber married Althea Adams. The marriage was troubled and ended in divorce in May 1935. Adams gave Thurber his only child, his daughter Rosemary. Thurber remarried in June, 1935 to Helen Wismer. His second marriage lasted until he died in 1961, at the age of 66, due to complications from pneumonia, which followed upon a stroke suffered at his home. His last words, aside from the repeated word "God," were "God bless... God damn," according to Helen Thurber.
Thurber had two brothers, William and Robert. Once, while playing a game of William Tell, his brother William shot James in the eye with an arrow. Because of the lack of medical technology, Thurber lost his eye. This injury would later cause him to be almost entirely blind. During his childhood he was unable to participate in sports and activities because of his injury, and instead developed a creative imagination, which he shared in his writings.
From 1913 to 1918, Thurber attended The Ohio State University, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. He never graduated from the University because his poor eyesight prevented him from taking a mandatory ROTC course. In 1995 he was posthumously awarded a degree.
From 1918 to 1920, at the close of World War I, Thurber worked as a code clerk for the Department of State, first in Washington, D.C. and then at the American Embassy in Paris, France. After this Thurber returned to Columbus, where he began his writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch from 1921 to 1924. During part of this time, he reviewed current books, films, and plays in a weekly column called "Credos and Curios," a title that later would be given to a posthumous collection of his work. Thurber also returned to Paris in this period, where he wrote for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.
In 1925, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, getting a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Post. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1927 as an editor with the help of his friend and fellow New Yorker contributor, E.B. White. His career as a cartoonist began in 1930 when White found some of Thurber's drawings in a trash can and submitted them for publication. Thurber would contribute both his writings and his drawings to The New Yorker until the 1950s.
Thurber was married twice. In 1922, Thurber married Althea Adams. The marriage was troubled and ended in divorce in May 1935. Adams gave Thurber his only child, his daughter Rosemary. Thurber remarried in June, 1935 to Helen Wismer. His second marriage lasted until he died in 1961, at the age of 66, due to complications from pneumonia, which followed upon a stroke suffered at his home. His last words, aside from the repeated word "God," were "God bless... God damn," according to Helen Thurber.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 9, 2018
Many chapters in this 1952 collection of "pieces about people" were originally published in The New Yorker. Presented roughly chronologically, they range from some rather tall tales about Thurber's pioneering Ohio forebears, to local characters from his youth, and on to the (rather drier) accounts of some favorite Ohio State Professors and journalistic colleagues. I discovered that I had a hard time associating the folksy-toned Thurber here with the Thurber of the The 13 Clocks, which is how I know him best. I kept vaguely thinking that I was reading something by William Steig or E.B. White. This is probably a unique problem of my own, though, and shouldn't be held against the book. I read aloud the episode about Thurber's mother and the dogs to my husband, and the success of that will always endear me to this book. But even without that, I think this one would be a keeper, because there's something in me that responds to the element of nostalgia for old times fading out of living memory that pervades this book.
Here is a passage which gives something of the flavor of the first (and more amusing) half of The Thurber Album. Thurber is writing about an elderly cantankerous 19th century cousin of his grandparents (or something) named Sam who finds his grown children unsatisfactory:
"He would be a dog, [Sam] used to complain, if he didn't think his children were a little quisby. Mary, for instance, smoked chawin' tabacca in her pipe, a chawin' tabacca strong enough to knock a dog off a gut-wagon. And there was that goddam lamp oil that Buddy, the doctor, was always tryin' to make folks take internal, for their ailments. The stuff was meant for lightin' houses, not for treatin' humans, and old Sam would have no part of it. When he lay dying, he refused a tablespoonful of lamp oil held to his lips by his solicitous son. 'I'd ruther die like a man than live like a lamp,' he said, and he died like a man."
Somehow, this passage makes me think of my grandfather, who was also from Ohio, and who, as a young man looked eerily like Thurber (maybe all mid-20th century black and white photos of crew cut white men in thick glasses look the same?). I've no way of knowing for sure if my grandfather ever read this particular essay, but something in my gut tells me that he did and laughed himself sick over it.
Thurber tells us in the foreword that "one of the most pleasant results of the writing of The Thurber Album has been the letters that I received from Mrs. Dorothy Canfield Fisher. If nothing else had come out of it at all, these letters would have amply repaid me for my efforts." They were probably corresponding about the Ohio State Professor who played in an amateur string quartet with the young Dorothy, whose father was the university president. I wish I could read those letters too. They don't appear to be included in the one published collection of her letters, Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
Here is a passage which gives something of the flavor of the first (and more amusing) half of The Thurber Album. Thurber is writing about an elderly cantankerous 19th century cousin of his grandparents (or something) named Sam who finds his grown children unsatisfactory:
"He would be a dog, [Sam] used to complain, if he didn't think his children were a little quisby. Mary, for instance, smoked chawin' tabacca in her pipe, a chawin' tabacca strong enough to knock a dog off a gut-wagon. And there was that goddam lamp oil that Buddy, the doctor, was always tryin' to make folks take internal, for their ailments. The stuff was meant for lightin' houses, not for treatin' humans, and old Sam would have no part of it. When he lay dying, he refused a tablespoonful of lamp oil held to his lips by his solicitous son. 'I'd ruther die like a man than live like a lamp,' he said, and he died like a man."
Somehow, this passage makes me think of my grandfather, who was also from Ohio, and who, as a young man looked eerily like Thurber (maybe all mid-20th century black and white photos of crew cut white men in thick glasses look the same?). I've no way of knowing for sure if my grandfather ever read this particular essay, but something in my gut tells me that he did and laughed himself sick over it.
Thurber tells us in the foreword that "one of the most pleasant results of the writing of The Thurber Album has been the letters that I received from Mrs. Dorothy Canfield Fisher. If nothing else had come out of it at all, these letters would have amply repaid me for my efforts." They were probably corresponding about the Ohio State Professor who played in an amateur string quartet with the young Dorothy, whose father was the university president. I wish I could read those letters too. They don't appear to be included in the one published collection of her letters, Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
October 5, 2025
A Collection of Pieces About People by James Thurber “Thurber is...a landmark in American humor...he is the funniest artist who ever lived”
10 out of 10
Now that we have war in Europe, next door in fact and according to some soothsayers, soon to engulf the rest of the continent and with that, the world, some might say that we need to stay focused, to laugh would be ‘to start Blasphemous Rumors’ (DM ‘God has a strange sense of humor and when I die, I expect to find him laughing’, there is also the wisdom of the sage from Venus on the Half-Shelf by Kilgore Trout aka Philip Jose Farmer [a note on the novel will be posted in the next couple of weeks, seeing that we have a back catalogue to put online first] who said that God in fact is a sadist, enjoying to watch suffering, calamity, which predominates and there is plenty of in Ukraine, Mariupol and other towns)
But we can also see it as needed therapy, not that the displaced of the war started by the short despot would find anything funny in what is going on and in the best of jokes or comedies you may tell, or have them watch, but there is a sense that we might all get too depressed and there is such a thing as Coping with Adversity and Trauma, and there are two possibilities (well, there would be a third placed in the middle or outside those two) one to suffer from PTSD, which is what most of the quarter of the population of the attacked country(!) that have fled the war would face, and the other for Post Traumatic Growth.
We learn much more about this from The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a wonderful Professor at the University of California, and how to deal with this challenge http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/t... from the simple solutions like taking walks outside, to the eliminate negative thoughts, which go back to the Stoics and the notion that you can’t be happy, if you are in despair.
This reader was thinking that to laugh with James Thurber http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/09/f... would work as therapy on quite a few levels, for even if you do not laugh with tears, which is what some episodes provoke, at the very least, there is a sort of detachment, and then the absurdity of some situations would make the world around, if not more palatable, somehow less of an impossible task to comprehend and live in…
In an article in The Economist, there was an analysis of the scale used for nuclear conflict, and the assessment that Stanley Kubrick could approach the subject only using the lenses of comedy, and the absurdity of what we see at the news provokes, panic, High Anxiety (now this is another comedy, Mel Brooks, Magister Ludi) and disbelief, there could be, or there must be in a multitude, a sense that they do not belong to this universe – to quote from films and books, there are characters that say ‘they do not want to live in a world that is this mad, cruel and without a meaning…God has created the world to have a show’ and what he likes most is violence is, to repeat the idea, what we find in Venus on the Half-Shelf
Now, if we laugh with Peter Sellers aka Dr. Strangelove (and another five personages) we may feel less inclined to disconnect, to hate the Russians (apparently, more than half support their Mad Strangelove, who acts much like the drunkard Soviet leader from the Kubrick comedy, if the one in the film is intoxicated with alcohol, the teetotaler they cherish in real life has other addictions, look at the many [ludicrous] photos in which he is flexing his muscles – he used to follow Arnold Schwarzenegger on tweeter, but now that the movie star has just posted a video in which he calls on his citizens to abandon the killer, there may a change there, I mean in the tweeter account, not in Russia, for there to be a revolution, we may b=need some alien intervention, like the folks in the aforementioned Farmer novel, which see that the earth is polluted beyond repair and send a deluge of biblical proportions to clean the planet and kill most of the inhabitants in the process- and he is a Narcissistic scum…to us his insult addressed to the opposition.
One may be reminded of humorous situations in one’s own past and a few come to mind – hence alert, this will veer off on a tangent, and let me hope that my business partner does not find the time to see this – as when we went to the disco and Socrates, who had very little English back then, would attack the Fine Young Cannibals tune with ‘she drives my crazy’, instead of ‘she drives me crazy’, which is not so funny per se, only he had quite long hair, which he kept waving from side to side, while he danced and the effect for us was almost, if not completely hilarious…these days there is more of a fear of what news he may bring, with the pandemic, war in Ukraine, the Kremlin Shorty and his talk of the atomic weapons he has and the use he could make of them, the company is not thriving, so no laughs on this front…
One of the most amusing things in memory involved the approaching Easter, thirty two years ago, when we had had a couple from Cheltenham bringing aid to us and a village in Oltenia – our gratitude was rather short lived, for we would not even keep in contact, awful bastards, never mind expressing constant gratitude, and if Socrates has a quite solid defense, his poor English, I should be ashamed of myself – and we had to pick up my friend at the railway station in Craiova, where I went ahead and told me ‘see that you tell them “I hate you” when you meet them, for this is what they say at Easter’ and he took my word for it, and in his serious, determined, strong style, he affirmed with conviction that ‘he hates them’ and that was such an uproar – and still is, as evidenced here, whenever some fabulous humorous story is read, this highlight is one of the remarkable events in the past
Evidently, the visitors did not take this so lightly, and if Joan Foster (gratitude expressed belatedly again, now) had met Socrates and knew about him somewhat, the other traveler would remain dizzy, confused, baffled by this and what would happen next…we took the aid to this village, where the mayor had a huge, tractor battery in the Lada car, and he was afraid of his…villagers, for they had had others bringing some help, and the suspicions had been creating a rift, they had had at least two opposing clans, and people would suspect him of getting a major share from what was coming, thus we would have to go out in an…open field, at the end of the trip, so that he would get at least something for his hosting our party, all the time looking for passing cars (there were not many in those parts, and for that matter, anywhere else in this land, after the communist days and the dead USSR, which the new red czar wants to resurrect)
10 out of 10
Now that we have war in Europe, next door in fact and according to some soothsayers, soon to engulf the rest of the continent and with that, the world, some might say that we need to stay focused, to laugh would be ‘to start Blasphemous Rumors’ (DM ‘God has a strange sense of humor and when I die, I expect to find him laughing’, there is also the wisdom of the sage from Venus on the Half-Shelf by Kilgore Trout aka Philip Jose Farmer [a note on the novel will be posted in the next couple of weeks, seeing that we have a back catalogue to put online first] who said that God in fact is a sadist, enjoying to watch suffering, calamity, which predominates and there is plenty of in Ukraine, Mariupol and other towns)
But we can also see it as needed therapy, not that the displaced of the war started by the short despot would find anything funny in what is going on and in the best of jokes or comedies you may tell, or have them watch, but there is a sense that we might all get too depressed and there is such a thing as Coping with Adversity and Trauma, and there are two possibilities (well, there would be a third placed in the middle or outside those two) one to suffer from PTSD, which is what most of the quarter of the population of the attacked country(!) that have fled the war would face, and the other for Post Traumatic Growth.
We learn much more about this from The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a wonderful Professor at the University of California, and how to deal with this challenge http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/t... from the simple solutions like taking walks outside, to the eliminate negative thoughts, which go back to the Stoics and the notion that you can’t be happy, if you are in despair.
This reader was thinking that to laugh with James Thurber http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/09/f... would work as therapy on quite a few levels, for even if you do not laugh with tears, which is what some episodes provoke, at the very least, there is a sort of detachment, and then the absurdity of some situations would make the world around, if not more palatable, somehow less of an impossible task to comprehend and live in…
In an article in The Economist, there was an analysis of the scale used for nuclear conflict, and the assessment that Stanley Kubrick could approach the subject only using the lenses of comedy, and the absurdity of what we see at the news provokes, panic, High Anxiety (now this is another comedy, Mel Brooks, Magister Ludi) and disbelief, there could be, or there must be in a multitude, a sense that they do not belong to this universe – to quote from films and books, there are characters that say ‘they do not want to live in a world that is this mad, cruel and without a meaning…God has created the world to have a show’ and what he likes most is violence is, to repeat the idea, what we find in Venus on the Half-Shelf
Now, if we laugh with Peter Sellers aka Dr. Strangelove (and another five personages) we may feel less inclined to disconnect, to hate the Russians (apparently, more than half support their Mad Strangelove, who acts much like the drunkard Soviet leader from the Kubrick comedy, if the one in the film is intoxicated with alcohol, the teetotaler they cherish in real life has other addictions, look at the many [ludicrous] photos in which he is flexing his muscles – he used to follow Arnold Schwarzenegger on tweeter, but now that the movie star has just posted a video in which he calls on his citizens to abandon the killer, there may a change there, I mean in the tweeter account, not in Russia, for there to be a revolution, we may b=need some alien intervention, like the folks in the aforementioned Farmer novel, which see that the earth is polluted beyond repair and send a deluge of biblical proportions to clean the planet and kill most of the inhabitants in the process- and he is a Narcissistic scum…to us his insult addressed to the opposition.
One may be reminded of humorous situations in one’s own past and a few come to mind – hence alert, this will veer off on a tangent, and let me hope that my business partner does not find the time to see this – as when we went to the disco and Socrates, who had very little English back then, would attack the Fine Young Cannibals tune with ‘she drives my crazy’, instead of ‘she drives me crazy’, which is not so funny per se, only he had quite long hair, which he kept waving from side to side, while he danced and the effect for us was almost, if not completely hilarious…these days there is more of a fear of what news he may bring, with the pandemic, war in Ukraine, the Kremlin Shorty and his talk of the atomic weapons he has and the use he could make of them, the company is not thriving, so no laughs on this front…
One of the most amusing things in memory involved the approaching Easter, thirty two years ago, when we had had a couple from Cheltenham bringing aid to us and a village in Oltenia – our gratitude was rather short lived, for we would not even keep in contact, awful bastards, never mind expressing constant gratitude, and if Socrates has a quite solid defense, his poor English, I should be ashamed of myself – and we had to pick up my friend at the railway station in Craiova, where I went ahead and told me ‘see that you tell them “I hate you” when you meet them, for this is what they say at Easter’ and he took my word for it, and in his serious, determined, strong style, he affirmed with conviction that ‘he hates them’ and that was such an uproar – and still is, as evidenced here, whenever some fabulous humorous story is read, this highlight is one of the remarkable events in the past
Evidently, the visitors did not take this so lightly, and if Joan Foster (gratitude expressed belatedly again, now) had met Socrates and knew about him somewhat, the other traveler would remain dizzy, confused, baffled by this and what would happen next…we took the aid to this village, where the mayor had a huge, tractor battery in the Lada car, and he was afraid of his…villagers, for they had had others bringing some help, and the suspicions had been creating a rift, they had had at least two opposing clans, and people would suspect him of getting a major share from what was coming, thus we would have to go out in an…open field, at the end of the trip, so that he would get at least something for his hosting our party, all the time looking for passing cars (there were not many in those parts, and for that matter, anywhere else in this land, after the communist days and the dead USSR, which the new red czar wants to resurrect)
July 19, 2008
Ha Ha Ha Ha
December 14, 2020
I’ll start by saying I didn’t plan on reading this book. The hardcover copy was in a pile of books my mother had for me to drop off at our local used book store. But a picked it up and...I’m so glad I did. Interesting, smart and empathetic portraits of interesting everyday people. Thurber’s style is intimate and friendly, but by no means simplistic. Keep your smartphone close by in order to look up his references —and a couple of new vocabulary words while you’re at it.
December 6, 2016
If all you've read of Thurber is "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," you're missing out. Here, Thurber talks about his illustrious and sometimes-rowdy forebears, as well as friends and colleagues of his during his time at Ohio State University and the Columbus Dispatch.
These are heartfelt, loving sketches of people now long dead who are restored to their colorful, storied life by the pen of a master. Highly recommended.
These are heartfelt, loving sketches of people now long dead who are restored to their colorful, storied life by the pen of a master. Highly recommended.
January 21, 2015
These portraits of Columbus Ohio (and NYC) of 90-120 years ago are best read in a quiet place, maybe out in the country, where you can slow down and enjoy them for Thurber's clear eye, wisdom and love for the subjects. Like having lunch with a generous friend from an older generation.
October 14, 2013
Vivid tales of people from Thurber's past.
Glimpses into the past.
Was a bit of a slog for me...
From a review I posted on another edition earlier today:
Thurber painted very vivid pictures of the people in his life.
Slogged through it, though, so 3/5.
Glimpses into the past.
Was a bit of a slog for me...
From a review I posted on another edition earlier today:
Thurber painted very vivid pictures of the people in his life.
Slogged through it, though, so 3/5.
November 13, 2019
This is a collection of character sketches were written originally for “The New Yorker” about family members and other people in Columbus, Ohio in the early 1900’s. Thurber writes gracefully and with humor in this very enjoyable recollection of times past.
March 3, 2008
Thurber's great but this is not one of his best. Some wonderful moments about his family, but not enough.
February 4, 2017
Charming.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews