Thomas Fensch

Conversations with James Thurber Thomas Fensch

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 of much of his humor.

In this captivating anthology of interviews with a great American humorist, James Thurber can be heard again, sharing his memories and insights, his wit and imagination.

These interviews span 22 years, from 1939 to 1961. In them Thurber recounts 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, when he had to recreate entire artciles from a few words of coded copy from the wire services.

... Thurber 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 puzzles gave him, and of his increasing blindness and its effect on his work, and his perceptions of the world.

In these pages, one can hear Thurber again and can visualize the Thurber men, the Thurber women, the Thurber dogs and the Thurber drawings as he reveals his own unique work and his interactions with it.