Thurber Thursday: Where Is Dr. Millmoss?

Where Is Dr. Millmoss?

I was looking through the very first New Yorker “Cartoon Issue” this morning (the issue dated December 15, 1997), rereading Roger Angell’s terrif piece, “Congratulations! It’s A Baby” (p.132) in which he wrote:

“After I went to boarding school, he [James Thurber] gave me a great interview for the school paper, along with the original of one of his most famous drawings, which somebody swiped from my dormitory room…(Be warned, whoever you are: Interpol and The Friends of Dr. Millmoss are on the case, big time…”)

Dr. Millmoss, is, as many of you reading the Spill know, the missing person in Thurber’s July 14, 1934 classic New Yorker drawing (shown above in an ad, and in the magazine) showing a woman asking a hippopotamus, “What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?”

Every so often I fixate on thinking about the whereabouts of this wonderful drawing. The drawing, as I’ve said before, changed my life, causing me to become a life-long member in the school of Thurber, setting my sights on becoming a New Yorker cartoonist. It is my desert island cartoon, my #1 cartoon in any list I’d draw up of favorite cartoons. It’s my Monty Python-ish cartoon version of the Holy Grail.

My hope is that the drawing is in a frame, hanging on a wall, being appreciated. If not, I hope it’s safely stored somewhere: in a trunk in an attic, or in a drawer. The thought that’s most difficult to contemplate: it’s lost for good.

If Mr. Angell had given the drawing away perhaps we wouldn’t be left with the mystery of what happened to it. But that it was “swiped” presents “complications.” But nearly 100 years (oh alright, 91 years) after its publication, wouldn’t it be more than wonderful to know Dr. Millmoss is, if not present, then at least accounted for?

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James Thurber’s A-Z:

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