cover image Thurberville

Thurberville

Bob Hunter. Trillium, $19.95 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-8142-1337-7

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. (May)