1 Years After Birth, James Thurber: Satirist, Poet, Curmudgeon

Walter Mitty was Everyman, and so was his creator, James Thurber, perhaps the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain. At least that was the assessment Thurber made of himself.

This year marks the centennial of Thurber's birth, and there is no shortage of assessments by others of this curious writer and cartoonist.

Thurber gave America not only Walter Mitty the dreamer, but also sketches that made Americans laugh at themselves and their foibles - drawings featuring a thin, hard-edged housewife, a daydreaming husband and a laid-back dog.

Thurber was born Dec. 8, 1894, and died at age 66 on Nov. 2, 1961. His 100th birthday year includes celebrations in his hometown, Columbus, Ohio, as well as in the town he set out to conquer, New York City. The U.S. Postal Service is issuing a James Thurber stamp.

A new, more favorable biography, by Harrison Kinney, also is being published, updating a previous critical one by Burton Bernstein that had earned the ire of many Thurber fans, including his daughter. Thurber was complex, friends say

People who knew Thurber see him as a complex man, embittered by a childhood accident that ultimately left him blind, and embittered too by what he considered unfair treatment at the New Yorker, the magazine with which his name is always associated although he remained on staff only seven years.

They talk about his alcoholism, but at the same time they talk about the kindness he showed to up-and-coming writers - provided they were male. They also talk of his influence on modern writers, from John Updike to Garrison Keillor.

Roland "Rollie" Algrant was an early Thurber fan. He was Thurber's driver as a teenager and later, after Thurber lost his sight, read to him. "He was always a calm and gentle guy and worked very hard," Algrant says.

Algrant owns about 10 Thurber drawings, including the last dog Thurber ever drew, a gift from Thurber's second wife, Helen. Sketches are treasures

It was Thurber's habit to make a drawing when the mood hit him, wherever he happened to be. As a result, many of the famous Thurber dogs and other sketches were lost over the years. His daughter, Rosemary, owns one treasure, a linen tablecloth he doodled on at Costello's bar on Third Avenue. It was covered with grease from the steak he had eaten, but the lines were embroidered so it could be laundered.

Thurber also did some sketching in the margins of Rosemary's Mother Goose book. "Unfortunately, I didn't know my father would be famous and I just colored them all in," she says ruefully.

She is a bit bitter about how some chroniclers of her dad have focused so much on his personal life and not enough on the quality of his work. Not just a humorist

Michael Rosen, executive director of the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, where Thurber was born, agrees. Rosen feels that Thurber is misunderstood if he is thought of only as a humorist. "His fables dealt with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a very dark period of our time," Rosen says.

It is safe to say as well that Thurber's works are read far less today than the works of Mark Twain, with whom he is often compared.

If schoolchildren still know Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, few know Walter Mitty. But to a generation of readers in the 1930s, '40s and '50s Walter Mitty was a familiar character synonymous with a henpecked Everyman but who, in his daydreams, became a Navy commander, millionaire banker, irresistible lover, world-famous surgeon.

What Thurber offered, writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, "was a tone - crusty bemusement eventually resolving itself into a wistful poetic insight." Thurber, he says, ". . . sounded like the voice of sanity because it took failure as a given and confusion as an absolute.

"A dismaying number of Thurber's pieces depend on funny things said by colored servants, immigrant workingmen and so forth," Gopnik writes. ". . . Thurber's popular reputation was as a lovable curmudgeon, and in the real world there is no such thing as a lovable curmudgeon." He was bitter about a lot

Thurber, apparently, was not an easy man to know or like.

But sadly, the image remembered most by those who knew him is that of an old, blind and embittered alcoholic. He was bitter about his New Yorker pay - from $200 to $400 per article - and bitter about his misfortune; he lost one eye as a boy when his brother, playing William Tell, hit him with an arrow while trying to shoot an apple off his head, then went blind in the other.

"By 1950, he was in total blindness," Rosen says. "He had been through two marriages, and while he was a wonderful raconteur and completely genial, too many scotches made him loud and insufferable. But whatever kind of person he was, we still have this body of work."

Rosen still sees Thurber as one of America's foremost humorists.

"The wit makes fun of other persons, the satirist makes fun of the world," Rosen says. "The humorist makes fun of himself, but in doing so, he identifies himself with people - that is people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature."

Rosen feels that Thurber's best work was done before 1940. In the last 20 years of his life his work was often rejected, even by the New Yorker. His editor at the magazine was Roger Angell.

"It fell to me to turn him down, and that made him bitter," says Angell, still a New Yorker editor and writer. "People he considered lesser writers were getting published, and so were people he didn't recognize. He had become famous, and fame was very important to him."