• LIFE

James Thurber: Portrait of the Man Who Invented Walter Mitty

2 minute read

The man LIFE magazine once called “the most disturbingly funny humorist in the U.S.” was both a marvelous writer and a sharp, wry cartoonist. “His characters,” LIFE noted (and this was as true of his writings as it was of his deceptively simple drawings), “inhabit a world of permanent desperation.”

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Today, as the movie adaptation of one of his most famous stories, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” lands in theaters all over the world, Thurber is remembered as a 20th-century cultural force on a par with other famous New Yorker contributors like E.B. White, Charles Addams and John Cheever.

For countless readers, though, it was Thurber — perhaps more than any other writer or cartoonist — who most reliably defined that fabled magazine’s tone and its visual style in the 1930s and ’40s.

Here, as James Thurber’s imaginative brilliance again enlivens the pop-culture landscape, this time in a film starring Ben Stiller and set in, among other places, LIFE magazine’s New York offices, LIFE.com remembers the great humorist in a series of pictures from 1945. Here he is, compensating for his famously poor eyesight — he lost one eye as a child when his brother shot him with an arrow — while creating a cartoon (below). The lines are a little wobbly, and the caption is written in just-legible handwriting, but the classic battle-of-the-sexes tension that Thurber made his particular area of study and parody for decades survive undimmed.

Thurber portrait: Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

James Thurber draws with a tremulous hand on large sheets of yellow paper. Powerful watchmaker's magnifier helps his good eye to see what he is doing.
Caption from LIFE. "James Thurber draws with a tremulous hand on large sheets of yellow paper. Powerful watchmaker's magnifier helps his good eye to see what he is doing."Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
James Thurber 1945
Caption from LIFE. "Thurber draws a cartoon in 6 minutes, did this one for LIFE to show his speed."Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
James Thurber, 1945.
Not published in LIFE. James Thurber, 1945.Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

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