James Grover Thurber was born of Charles Thurber and Mame Fisher on December 8th, 1894 in a house given to his parents by his grandfather, William M. Thurber, that same year. Named after the town's first librarian and the family minister, James Grover, he was called "Jamie" by his family and friends. He resided at 251 Parsons Avenue in Columbus, Ohio - the city which held his heart and the subject of many of his stories - for the first six months of his life. However, when his job-searching father landed a position as secretary to a U.S. Congressman, the family promptly uprooted and moved to Washington, D.C.
While in their rented summer home in Falls Church, Virginia, Jamie was shot in the left eye by his older brother William with a homemade arrow. In the early 1900s, the proper way to cope with this situation would have been to immediately removed the left eye and replace it with a glass replica. However, his mother was deeply into Christian Science at the time and refused to take him to a specialist. 
Instead, she took him to an incompetant doctor who told her to leave the eye be. For weeks it festered until a competant and even well-renowned doctor removed the eye and replaced it with the glass one. Unfortunately, by this time the damage to the left eye had already caused an inflammation of the undamaged eye, thus leaving poor Jamie with only one "good" eye that provided for barely moderate eyesight and would get progressively worse. By the 1940s, James Thurber was completely blind. Despite his handicap, Thurber never once complained. He only reminded everyone that he was a better writer because of it.
When the politics of Washington grew old, the Thurber family relocated back to Columbus where James' father was secretary to an Ohio Senator. Because of financial limitations they moved to his cold and sometimes abusive grandfather's mansion. Jamie was the victim of most of his grandfather's abusiveness, so he moved in with the midwife who delivered him, Margery Albright. He attended two schools and after struggling through the first years of his education, by eighth grade he was gaining the attention and friendship of many. He then attended East High school (Columbus' finest), where he ran for and one the senior class presidency. He graduated with honors and delivered the President's Address on graduation day.
By 1914, the Thurber family had moved yet again. This time to 77 Jefferson Avenue. This home was the source for his book My Life and Hard Times, which includes true stories about the bed falling on his father and a ghost in the house. From there he moved to Ohio State University, where he found a hard time fitting in. Barely making it through his freshman year, young Thurber failed every class sophomore year because of lack of attendance - he simply never attended a class. The next year he decided to try again. However, by junior year he was 23 and had attended college for 5 years. In the spring of 1918 he dropped out and moved to Washington to attend a cryptography class and decode messages for the war.
He was sent to Paris very near the end of the war and by the time he got there the war was virtually over. Following the 16 months in Paris, where he lost his virginity to a show girl, he became homesick for Columbus and headed back home. In 1922 he saw a picture of Althea Adams, a student at OSU, in the yearbook and immediately decided to marry her. This being accomplished, he became a reporter and writer for many newspapers such as the Dispath, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Cleveland News Leader . Althea was not content to stay in Ohio, and she promptly convinced him to move to Jay, New York, and later France. In France he relocated from the rural and boring Normandy to bustling Paris where he quickly found work at the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. At the age of 31, he returned to New York in June of 1926 alone. His wife Althea had chosen to remain in France for the time-being. He had 10 dollars and his propencity for literature.
He took up a job at the Evening Post and from there moved to The New Yorker where he was hired immediately by Harold Ross. Ross would have such a great impact on him that he would write a memoir entitled The Years with Ross. In November of 1929 he published his first book, Is Sex Necessary? or Why You Feel The Way You Do - which, despite the title, contained nothing lewd and instead commented on the modern courting and marriage rituals. It was in this book that Thurber's cartoons became well known and even popular. His famous "Thurber man" and "Thurber woman" were now recognizable.
During this time Althea returned from France. Although he and Althea remained married until May 1935, his relationship with Althea became increasingly more estranged. The had two places of residence - one in Conneticut and one in New York, which was owned by the newspaper and many reporters stayed there. Althea favored the former and stayed there while James preferred the latter and resided there with his friends. During these times Mr. Thurber began an affair with Ann Honeycutt, which would continue for nearly his entire life. He and Althea were reconciled for a short period after this time during which their first and only child, Rosemary, was conceived. When she was born, Thurber became softened and returned to be a good father to his child and they bought an estate named "Sandy Hook". However, things worsened between he and his wife and Althea demanded a separation. James was agreeable and even very generous when it came to settlement terms (included in the terms drawn by his lawyer was the custody of Rosemary, Sandy Hook, the family insurance policies, alimony and child suport, as well as a portion of the royalties of his upcoming book My Life and Hard Times. Althea quickly filed for divorce, and James was left with his three extramarital affairs of the time - a woman from Manhattan, Ann Honeycutt, and Helen Murial Wismer, his future wife. This marriage was probably the result of the marriage between Ann Honeycutt and the other man she was dating, St. Clair McKelway - a colleague of Thurber's at The New Yorker. The next day after Thurber's divorce he proposed to Helen Wismer in the lobby of the Algonquin, who said yes. On June 25, 1935, they were wed. It was the period of his life that was yet ahead which Thurber would become most creative and productive. They moved to a Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan and then to a country cottage in Conneticut. While here Thurber created his most touching a serious piece; a parable entitled The Last Flower which depicts World Wars XII and XIII. Ironically it predicted the nuclear destruction of the world with the exception of three survivors - a man, a woman, and a flower. 
On the other end of the spectrum, Thurber's play, The Male Animal, was produced and put on the stage in California (Thurber made yet another move) and with the help of Herman Shumlin made it to Broadway. The huge success of this play put an astronimical amount of stress on both Helen and James - landing her in the hospital and he drinking and nearly blind in a hotel room bed. Before cataract surgery, he and Helen headed to Bermuda where he could finally take some time off. Over the following 11 months, Thurber would have 5 eye surgeries, most of which were unsuccessful, a six-month depression, and very hard, long, and painful recovery from all. After all of this he had finally reached the point where he was unable to type and he could not see to draw his beloved cartoons. He did not let this hinder his spirit, however, and he scrawled words on pages with pencil while Helen typed them up and read them aloud. With his phenomenal memory he was capable of remembering and revising what was read aloud. He wrote children's fairy stories, the fairy tale called Many Moons being one of the most prominent; and he also wrote two tales about men gone insane entitled "A Whip-Poor-Will" and "A Friend to Alexander".
In the spring of 1942 he and Helen rented a home in Cornwall, Conneticut where he seemed to recover both mentally and physically. It was here that he created perhaps his finest of short stories, "The Catbird Seat". In addition, Helen helped him compile a collection of previous works entitled My World and Welcome To It, which sold a great amount of copies in the United States as well as Britain. In 1945, his most popular collection of stories was released entitled A Thurber Carnival which sold well over 40,000 copies in its first year and continues to sell. Also in 1945, he completed his favorite of fairy tales, The White Deer. 
By 1951 he was well known and greatly loved by all of America and Britain. However, his legacy would far outlive his productivity, health, and sanity. His work would slowly become more criticized for being strained and his strength to refute these remarks would slowly diminish. In 1952 and 1953 he would describe himself as "an old torn dollar umbrella stuck in a trash bin and it is beginning to rain". As his ability to be funny fleed him, his relationship with The New Yorker became a tough one. He admitted that "I can't do anything now since my humor sounds like that of an assistant embalmer....I fear that where my fancy flowered and my wild invention grew, there is now a small and arid space. 
The fresh phrases are wilted and there is rust on my metaphor mixer". One event did brighten this gloomy period in Thurber's life; the marriage of Rosemary. Shortly following this gleeful event he published the anthology Thurber Country. In line with the success of this anthology of later works, things began to look up.
However, this happiness was not to last long. In 1961 Thurber slipped into depression and then into a neurological condition where he would run into chairs and tables, he lost control of his bladder, and he would have consistant blackouts. On October 4, 1961 Thurber collapsed at 6 A.M. and hit his head. His head was examined and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. During surgery a large, blood filled tumor was found near the speech control center of Thurber's brain and was removed. He then contracted pneumonia and developed a blood clot in the lung.
On November 2, 1961, James Grover Thurber faded into death. If we do not remember him, do not remember his works, we may at least in his honor...remember laughter.
Is Sex Necessary? or Why You Feel the Way You Do - 1929.
The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities - 1931
The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments - 1950
My Life and Hard Times - 1933
The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze - 1935
Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces - 1960
The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures - 1939
Fables For Our Time, and Famous Poems Illustrated - 1940
Further Fables for Our Time - 1956
My World - And Welcome To It - 1942
Thurber's Men, Women and Dogs - 1943
The Thurber Carnival - 1945
The White Deer - 1945
The Beast in Me and Other Animals : A Collection of Pieces and Drawings About Human Beings and Less Alarming Creatures - 1948
The 13 Clocks - 1950
The Thurber Album; A New Collection of Pieces About People - 1952
Thurber Country: A New Collection of Pieces About Males and Females, Mainly of Our Own Species - 1953
Thurber's Dogs: A Collection of the Master's Dogs, Written and Drawn, Real and Imaginary, Living and Long Ago - 1955
The Wonderful O - 1957
Alarms and Diversions - 1957
The Years with Ross - 1959
Lanters and Lances - 1961
Credos and Curios - 1962
92 Stories - 1985
Tales of the Diamond : Selected Gems of Baseball Fiction - 1996
Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.
A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.
There is, of course, a certain amount of drudgery in newspaper work, just as there is in teaching classes, tunneling into a bank, or being President of the United States.
While he was not as dumb as an ox, he was not any smarter either.
Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.
A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.
You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
Man...is surely further away from the Answer than any other animal this side of the ladybug.
Our everday lives, right after college, become as unworkable as a Ford in a vat of molasses.
In certain cases grammatical corectness must often by subordinated to a consideration of taste.
When all is dark within the house/ Who knows the monster from the mouse?