Word: thurber
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...unicorn nibbled its last rose, and left the garden. But readers knew well enough what they had seen. James Thurber, who died at 66 last week, a month after an emergency operation to relieve a blood clot on the brain, was an aphorist of sad truths who mourned his times with laughter...
Words were Thurber's obsession; in one of his stories drunken friends burst in upon the narrator, forlornly sober, to tell him of the words they have found locked in other words...
What words are locked in Thurber? There is rue and her (Thurber's battle of the sexes, of course); hurt (the battle does not go well); the rub (Walter Mitty playing Hamlet); rube (the author was an Ohio boy); and true (it is harder to fool little girls these days...
...what of brute, locked up with the rest? The answer is that Thurber considered himself, half correctly, a rough, bruising satirist. "I am in a corner without being backed there," he wrote, "and I often come out fighting." To be thought a nice, lovable old character must have been as hard to endure as the slow onset of blindness. He bore both afflictions with dignity...
Goddammit, Write. Columbus, Ohio, was where the bed fell on father, and the ghost got in, where the dog that bit people did his dirty work. It was very nearly where Thurber stayed. He skipped graduation at Ohio State University to serve as a code clerk in Paris during World War I, but returned to cover city hall for the Columbus Dispatch. It was 1925 before Thurber's first wife, Althea, a beautiful girl who had twice been elected Campus Rosebud at State, persuaded him to go to Paris and write a novel, like everyone else...