James Thurber

James Thurber was born in 1894 at Columbus, Ohio, where, as he once said, so many awful things happened to him. After university (Ohio State) he worked at the American Embassy in Paris from 1918 to 1920, and then turned to journalism. From 1927 onwards he was on the staff of the New Yorker, and first published much of his work in it.

Thurber's art was easy to recognise but hard to define. He created a world in which mournfully sagacious hounds loom over frightened little men who are trying desperately to master life's problems. His drawings and prose alike were marked by economy, wry humour, and an inimitable blend of precision and fantasy. Perhaps his most justly famous character was Walter Mitty, whose Secret Life gloriously makes up for the shy young man's failures in competitive real life.

In late life James Thurber became increasingly blind. He died in New York in 1961. In an Observer appreciation, Paul Jennings wrote that 'he somehow gave us a sense of revelation ... He created a genre and was a giant in it.'