Thurberville
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.
 
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Thurberville
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.
 
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Thurberville

Thurberville

by Bob Hunter
Thurberville

Thurberville

by Bob Hunter

eBook

$23.95 

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Overview

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780814274996
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Publication date: 04/28/2017
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 397
File size: 9 MB

About the Author

Bob Hunter is a sports columnist at The Columbus Dispatch and author of Saint Woody: The History and Fanaticism of Ohio State Football and A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus.

Read an Excerpt

Columbus as Thurberville

James Thurber’s Columbus wasn’t 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.

The Columbus he called home until his late twenties set the standard for average, a medium-sized city in the middle of America that probably veered toward the center of just about any kind of ranking in which it found itself. It sat near the geographic center of Ohio, which helped make it the state capital. It sat in the midst of miles of flat farmland, which helped make it a model of Midwestern monotony. It featured a state university that an average student could navigate and two small rivers that converged into one moderately sized river that average boats couldn’t. It had a minor league baseball team, a minor league horse track, and, despite some major league attributes, a minor league mentality.

It also had Thurber, a chance occurrence destined to introduce a spectacularly average place to the world as the wacky, panties-on-his-head, joke-cracking life of every party. His Columbus is a wild and crazy place, a city full of peculiar characters, bizarre incidents, and unexpected events. There’s a ghost in Thurber’s house. Uncle Zenas dies of elm tree blight. Aunt Sarah Shoaf piles all of her valuables outside her bedroom door every night with a note advising would-be burglars to “take it, this is all I have.” The city flees in terror over a rumor that the dam has broken. His grandfather still thinks he is fighting the Civil War. Sullivant Elementary is overrun by old students with muscles and moustaches. A servant mistakes Thurber’s father for the Antichrist and comes after him while waving a bread knife.

The world came to know Thurber’s Columbus and love it like an eccentric family member. The world became acquainted with his characters and never let go of them. It was the only Columbus many knew, and they became attached to it, regardless of how much or how little of it was real.

Playwright and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart grew up in the same Columbus Thurber did; he was nine days older. When he moved overseas in the 1950s to escape the arts-suspicious, Commie hunters of Senator Joseph McCarthy, he was surprised to find that people knew his hometown. “When I first came to live in London, I was amazed at the number of Englishmen who said ‘Oh, yes, Columbus, of course. I know it very well, from Thurber’s books, you know.’”

But they didn’t know Columbus as well as they knew Thurber’s Columbus, which could be both different and the same. When Thurber wrote about the Get Ready Man, “a lank, unkempt, elderly gentleman with wild eyes and a deep voice who used to go about shouting at people through a megaphone to prepare for the end of the world,” his subject was a living human who had caught the writer’s attention and had taken residence in his mind. But whether the Get Ready Man interrupted Mantell’s production of King Lear at the Colonial Theatre in the comic way Thurber described, stopping the performance with wails of “Get rea-dy!” and “The Worr-uld is coming to an end!” is anyone’s guess.
 

Table of Contents

Thurberville Half Title Page Title Page Copyright CONTENTS PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION: Columbus as Thurberville FAMILY MATTERS: The Fishers and the Thurbers CHAPTER 1. The Original Thurber House CHAPTER 2. A Good Man Victimized by Humor CHAPTER 3. The Funniest Thurber CHAPTER 4. Aunt Pharmacy CHAPTER 5. The Man Thrower CHAPTER 6. Showing His Fisher CHAPTER 7. Mother Katherine CHAPTER 8. A Frontiersman in the Family CHAPTER 9. Sugar Grove Days CHAPTER 10. The Real Walter Mitty CHAPTER 11. The Star-Crossed Thurber CHILDHOOD MATTERS: Homes, Haunts, Honeys, and Hangouts CHAPTER 12. The Edge of Civilization CHAPTER 13. The Great, Dark House on Bryden Road CHAPTER 14. The Clock in Thurber’s Dreams CHAPTER 15. Fighting for an Education CHAPTER 16. Parking Lot of Dreams CHAPTER 17. The One Girl CHAPTER 18. Scorpions, Spiders, and Boas— Oh, My! CHAPTER 19. The Dam That Didn’t Break CHAPTER 20. Wool-Stocking School CHAPTER 21. The House the Ghost Got In UNIVERSITY MATTERS: Making It Through the Minefield CHAPTER 22. Dear Old Nugey CHAPTER 23. Captain Coldheart CHAPTER 24. The Girl Who “Discovered” Thurber CHAPTER 25. Thurber’s Favorite Player CHAPTER 26. Literary Tour Guide CHAPTER 27. Professor Courageous CHAPTER 28. “Gentle, Lovable Billy Graves” CHAPTER 29. A Place Not to Call Home LITERARY MATTERS: Inspiration and Incubation in Thurberville CHAPTER 30. The Mystery of the Missing Manuscripts CHAPTER 31. A Paragrapher for the Ages CHAPTER 32. The News Was Served Here CHAPTER 33. An Ink-Stained Dinosaur CHAPTER 34. Breakfast at Marzetti’s CHAPTER 35. “It’s McNulty” CHAPTER 36. Janitor of the Passing Show CHAPTER 37. From the ’Hood to Hollywood CHAPTER 38. The Boy Thurber Put in Hysterics LATER MATTERS: Going Away and Coming Home CHAPTER 39. Shooter of the Stars CHAPTER 40. His Real-Life “Thurber Woman” CHAPTER 41. Married in History CHAPTER 42. Thurber’s “Closest” Friend CHAPTER 43. The Hotel That Aged with Thurber CHAPTER 44. Mame Slept Here CHAPTER 45. The Wonderful Gs CHAPTER 46. Bookends of a Stage Career CHAPTER 47. The Neighborhood Kid Who “Collected” Thurber CHAPTER 48. The Last Flower Doc Marlowe Julius Ziegfeld Columbus Metropolitan Library Douglas School Olentangy Park Una Soderblom John Hance Miss Naddy’s Dancing Academy Reverend Karl W. Scheufler George Karb Park Hotel Norwich Hotel Guy Harold “Hal” Cooley Alfred Barron Callen Ludwig Lewisohn John C. Harlor Ed Morris Ralph L. McCombs Johnny Jones James Theater Notes to Chapter 1 Notes to Chapter 3 Notes to Chapter 6 Notes to Chapter 9 Notes to Chapter 11 Notes to Chapter 13 Notes to Chapter 17 Notes to Chapter 20 Notes to Chapter 22 Notes to Chapter 25 Notes to Chapter 28 Notes to Chapter 31 Notes to Chapter 33 Notes to Chapter 36 Notes to Chapter 39 Notes to Chapter 42 Notes to Chapter 46 Notes to the Appendix BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX
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