Word: thurberism
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Divorced. James Thurber, 40, one-eyed New Yorker writer, amateur artist famed for his shapeless women and droopy men (TIME, Dec. 31); by Mrs. Althea A. Thurber; in Bridgeport, Conn. Grounds: that he drank, was unfaithful, often got in fights which he invariably lost...
Tribune. Later he returned to New York, got himself a job on the old Evening Post. From that journalistic wreck he was rescued by bristle-haired, buck-toothed Editor Harold Ross of The New Yorker, who spent many months trying to make Thurber into a managing editor...
That he could never be, but James Thurber quickly established himself as one of the ablest, easily the maddest member of the neurotic crew that staffs the brightest weekly in the U. S. For two years no one but his friend and fellow editor, Elwyn Brooks ("Andy") White, could see anv merit in the thousands of drawings with which Thurber covered all the loose stationery in The New Yorker office. Artist Thurber may not be a second Picasso but he is indubitably one of the most prolific telephone booth moral ists in the world...
...doors and tearing down office partitions, he distrib uted among his friends a secret supply of pass keys to The New Yorker offices. Once he held a noise-making contest with carpenters and plasterers by rolling metal trash baskets up & down corridors. Stenographers still remember the day when James Thurber powdered his face white, upset the telephone booth, climbed into it, pretended he was a corpse in a coffin...
Since 1930, his scrawls of impotent, amorphous men and women and sad-eyed hounds have gained him international fame. They are enormously funny, and like most lasting humor, are the products of an unhappy mind. Three Thurber drawings that his associates on The New Yorker would never print were on view in his exhibition last week. Two were blasphemous: The Thurber Madonna and The Three Wise Men (three goggle-eyed oldsters smirking behind their hands at something that might be the Virgin). The third was The Gates of Life. Glum pedestrians hustled by in the background; sprawled on the grass...