In Conversations with James Thurber this remarkable man who has been
called America¿s twentieth-century Mark Twain and who was one of the
great talkers of his time expresses his opinions on just about
everything and recounts stories and anecdotes about his life which
provided the basis for much of his humor writing. These entertaining
interviews, conducted by Arthur Miller, Harvey Breit, George Plimpton,
Arthur Gelb, and others, span twenty-two years, from 1939--1961. In them
Thurber recalls his youth in Columbus, Ohio, his struggles as a student
at Ohio State University, and his days of literary and journalistic
apprenticeship in Europe as a code clerk and newspaperman who had to
recreate entire stories from a few words of coded copy provided by the
wire service. He tells too of his early days in New York City when he
joined the staff of The New Yorker, of the origins of his drawings, of
the pleasures that word games and mental puzzles gave him, and of his
increasing blindness and its effect on his work and his perception of
the world. As a man who like to express his opinions and to have an
audience, Thurber enjoyed interviews and rarely refused to grant them.
With the interview format he became so skilled that he perfected the
interview-monologue into a Thurberesque art form, the oral equivalent of
the autobiographical essay that he refined in his prose.
