James Thurber

(1894 - 1961)

At the age of thirty-two in 1927, James Thurber published his first story in The New Yorker and befriended one of its editors, E.B. White, who recommended Thurber to the magazine’s founder, Harold Ross. Thurber and White went on to share a cubicle at the office and cowrite the Talk of the Town feature. Thurber published My Life and Hard Times in 1933—critic Dwight Macdonald judged it “the best humor to come out of the post–World War I period”—and The Years with Ross in 1959. He died two years later.