Thurber House
Near Columbus, Ohio
On Jefferson Avenue near downtown Columbus sits a Victorian frame house where one of the twentieth century's sharpest American humorists spent his formative years. James Thurber lived here from nineteen thirteen to nineteen seventeen as a young man, and the house made it into his writing, as the setting of stories like The Night the Ghost Got In and The Night the Bed Fell. Thurber went on to spend decades at The New Yorker, where he wrote essays, short stories, and captions for the looping, melancholy cartoons that made him famous.
After his death the house sat vacant, fell into disrepair, and was slated for demolition in the nineteen seventies before preservationists rescued it. Thurber House opened as a literary center and museum in nineteen eighty-four. It now hosts writer residencies, the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and children's workshops, keeping the building exactly as alive as Thurber would have wanted.
