James Thurber's Columbus

James Grover Thurber was born on December eighth, eighteen ninety-four, in a house on Parsons Avenue in Columbus, Ohio. He was about seven years old when his brother shot him in the left eye with an arrow while they were playing with a bow and arrow set. He lost that eye. The vision in the other eye gradually deteriorated from the same trauma, and by the nineteen forties he was nearly blind.

He attended Ohio State University, worked as a code clerk at the American embassy in Paris after the war, came back to Columbus, and was hired as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. In nineteen twenty-seven he was hired by The New Yorker. He moved to New York. He spent the rest of his career writing about, drawing for, and occasionally escaping from a magazine that was the center of American literary comedy for four decades.

And yet the material he kept returning to was Columbus. In nineteen thirty-three he published My Life and Hard Times, a book of comic autobiographical essays set in the Columbus of his childhood and young adulthood: the family dogs, the relatives with eccentric beliefs about electricity, the time the dam broke and everyone in the neighborhood fled in a panic, the general atmosphere of a midwestern city that he loved with the specific affection of someone who had left it and could therefore see it clearly.

The house where he lived as a young man on Jefferson Avenue is the Thurber House now, a museum and literary center. Columbus does not make as much of Thurber as it might. He is not a marquee figure in the way that a novelist or a president would be. He wrote comedy. He drew wobbly dogs and bewildered men and capable women on deadline. He documented a particular version of American life, from Columbus, that is not as well remembered as it deserves to be.