Thurber Thursday: Latest Addition To The Spill Library
In my (seemingly) never ending completist quest, I finally got around to getting hold of the Armed Services edition of James Thurber’s & Elliot Nugent’s The Male Animal (as recently as last month I mentioned the edition here). You can see by the cover that the book was bundled with four others. Still a longish way to go, completist-wise, collecting Thurber Armed Services editions.*
Below is what’s in the Spill library as of now (with some other New Yorker-related ASEs):
*Still out there:
My Life And Hard Times; The Thurber Carnival; (with E.B. White)Is Sex Necessary?
_________________________________________________________________________
Here’s the first edition of The Male Animal, published by Random House in 1940
___________________________________________________________________
James Thurber’s A-Z Entry:
James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”
Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website






Glad you enjoyed it!
Watched the James Stevenson film. Terrific. Thanks for mentioning it the other day.