Thurberville
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
James Thurber’s Columbus was not today’s Columbus—or even yesterday’s. It was a Columbus he both knew and created, a place perched on the fringe of reality and the fringe of his imagination. It is the place Bob Hunter revisits in Thurberville, a book where the author separates truth from fiction and identifies what parts of the famous humorist’s hometown of 180,000 exist in the burgeoning metro area of more than two million today.
Thurber’s Columbus was a wild and crazy place, a city full of fascinating and sometimes peculiar characters, many in his own family. Because of the widespread popularity of his stories, that was also the Columbus that many of his readers around the world came to know.
Thurberville chronicles those characters and explores that world. But it also examines the real city where Thurber struggled and then blossomed as a college student, worked as a newspaper reporter and a press agent, and achieved international fame as a humorist and cartoonist after he left town, in part by writing about the subjects he left behind.
Much of Thurber’s best work was cultivated by experiences Thurber had in Columbus and in his dealings with family, friends, teachers, and acquaintances there. They are worth a revisit and, in some cases, an introduction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After rising to fame as a writer and cartoonist for the New Yorker, James Thurber (1894 1961) was still indelibly linked to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Hunter, a sports columnist for the Columbus Dispatch, where Thurber started his career, maps the city of Thurber s childhood and young adulthood while also registering how it has changed over time. His lively, if sometimes scattered, volume is a tribute to the personalities and places that make up a community. Hunter provides addresses throughout so that the avid Thurberphile can visit the homes and haunts that influenced young Thurber, even though most are gone or transformed beyond recognition. Hunter creates biographical sketches of Thurber in different places, including Trinity Episcopal Church, where Thurber married; the Deshler Hotel, where he stayed on returns home; and the old Dispatch offices. And he resurrects the numerous folk who all contributed to Thurber s unique take on the world, including Thurber s eccentric (and sometimes tragic) family; his cadre of friends, including fellow Columbus native Donald Ogden Stewart, a famous playwright and screenwriter; and the newspapermen and college professors who populated his formative years. The physical traces of Thurber s Columbus are mostly gone, but they remain immortalized in Thurber s prose, and, now, in Hunter s meticulous account.
