Word: thurberism
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Slow Fade. Thurber is not totally blind. At the age of six, he lost his left eye when one of his brothers accidentally shot him with an arrow. For about the next 40 years, his right eye did double duty, then it failed him; ten years ago, Thurber underwent five extremely painful operations on it for cataract and trachoma. The eye has since had one-eighth vision, not enough for a 56-year-old writer to get himself around with safety. The shins of the long, gangling (6 ft. 1½ in., 154 Ibs.) Thurber bear a mass of scars...
Before his sight began to go, Thurber could punch a typewriter at a brisk pace. Never having learned the touch system, however, he is now forced to scrawl with soft pencils on sheets of bright yellow paper, getting about 20 words to a sheet, words which he cannot see, although he peers at them through a thick goggle. After he has finished the first draft of a piece, it is read back to him, and he makes oral revisions sentence by sentence. Thurber always was a relentless reviser (he rewrote The White Deer 25 times) so that his composition...
After a lapse of several years, during which he did not draw at all, Thurber is drawing again (see cover). He works with chalk on black paper, preferably just at sundown on clear days. About the porch of his Connecticut home, where he has his drawing board set up, drawings are stacked along with stove wood...
...days when there is a lot of glare, Thurber sometimes sees a face that looks to him like Herbert Hoover's; at other times, there appears what might be the George Washington Bridge flapping in the wind. Thurber is never bitter about his blindness, nor self-pitying, nor "saintly." Often he discusses it in a completely detached manner; now & then he uses it for little jokes. "I bet I can think up a cornier title for my memoirs than you can," he challenged a friend. "How about Long Time...
Home Life. James Grover Thurber was born in Columbus in 1894, second of the three children of Charles Leander and Mary Agnes Fisher Thurber. (Mrs. Thurber didn't like the "Leander," so her husband, a loyal Republican, changed it to "Lincoln.") Their other sons were William, a year older than Jim, and Robert, two years younger...