Talk:James Thurber

0 views

FAC plans

[edit]

I'm hoping to work on this article, and would like to eventually nominate it at FAC. Leaving this note here in case anyone else is interested in helping with the article. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:22, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Change to short references

[edit]

I'd like to change the citation style to short references. Does any editor of this article have any objections? If not I'll start making the change as I add more material over the next weeks. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:57, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Peer review

[edit]

James Thurber

[edit]
Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch peer review


I've listed this article for peer review because I've rewritten it, and would like feedback.

I'm aware it needs sections that analyze Thurber's work -- themes, analysis, critical commentary, scholarly opinion. I am not sure if I can tackle that part of the article, but may have a go next month. For now, I would like feedback on what's there, which is just the biography. I was thinking of taking this to FAC but I can't even think about that unless/until the themes etc. section is written.

A note on sources: there are five biographies of Thurber. I've used Bernstein most extensively because other than Kinney, it's the longest and most detailed. It has been criticized for being too negative, and I've tried to keep a balance, but there are definitely some negative things that needed to be included. Kinney is even more detailed than Bernstein but is organized thematically so it's hard to use as a basis for a narrative. It's a bit fannish, with ludicrous levels of detail (e.g. the date on which Thurber had to renew his library card). I've used it in a few places to correct or augment Bernstein. Holmes was the first biography; it's not all that thorough biographically but has more literary discussion than the others, and will be useful if I get to the literary section, though it's over 50 years old now. There are two other biographies which I've skimmed and will go through again in more detail; I've found nothing in either worth adding yet.

Thanks, Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:34, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Tim riley

[edit]

Booking a place. I'm a fan of Thurber, both written and drawn, and look forward to reviewing. I have a bit in my diary at the moment, so may be a day or two. Tim riley talk 20:14, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

The biography is in excellent shape, though at 8,500 words you haven't left yourself much room for the promised Works section if the article is to remain of readable length. There is, of course, no obligation to combine Life and Works in a single article and as a stand-alone biography the present text makes a wholly satisfying article.

A few minor commons on the prose:

That's all from me. Happy to comment on the Works section when you're ready. – Tim riley talk 10:18, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Length
[edit]

Thank you; these are very helpful. All fixed or responded to above. Is it really an option to have a pure bio article and put the discussion of his works into another article? If so that would be great and I could probably take this to FAC -- I don't think I'm going to have the energy to assemble a critical section. Would I need to stub an article for that material? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:58, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

We are positively encouraged to break up long articles into two or more, and as JT's biography takes 8,500 words – well, see WP:TOOBIG. I agree that a link to even a rudimentary spin-off article on Thurber's works would be a good idea (and would, I suspect, be called for by FAC reviewers). I might be able to chip in with the Works article once my diary is a bit less crammed. I'm not bad at compiling bibliographies and can trawl the web, both open and many paywall sites, for reviews, analyses etc. I suggest you ask future PR reviewers if they concur with me that the biography on its own, with no Lit Crit section is suitable for FAC. I'm taking the liberty of inviting Gog the Mild, a friend IRL as well as an FAC coordinator, for his thoughts here on that. – Tim riley talk 15:41, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply] Good afternoon Tim. And to Mike. I feel that the article is currently too long. I really struggled with it and I think most readers would. Ideally it could do with having some content removed to sub-articles and with the application of a little more summary style. I am sure it would get a hard time at FAC as is. To answer the specific question, while non-military bios are not an area I know much about I think separate articles on Thurber's works and on the lit crit would be the way to go. You may wish to include a brief summary of the latter in this over-arching article - although this would exacerbate the length issue. At the risk of attempting to teach granny how to suck eggs, the vast number of sub-articles on George Washington did not come up when it recently went through FAC, and it is difficult to see how else his biography could have been handled. (Nb {{George Washington series}} and {{George Washington}}.) Which may give you ideas for this article. If you do go that way you could end up with 3 or 4 FACs, a FL and an FT between you. :-) Does any of that help? Gog the Mild (talk) 16:45, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply] Thanks both; that's very helpful. Tim, if you really think you might have time to work on the "works" spin-off article I would much rather wait for that than try it on my own, and I would certainly try to help with it as much as I could. Gog, any areas where you feel the current article is getting bogged down in uninteresting details? I haven't done many bios and I am finding I'm too close to the topic to be able to easily tell what's interesting background colour (such as, I hope, the note about Capote) and what is just filler that makes no difference to the story of a life. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:29, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply] Well, cough, much of it. Early life and education is a bit chatty, I imagine it could lose 10-15% of its words with little ill effect. Ohio State University: The stuff about gym and miliary tactics? In fact the whole saga of which classes he may or may not have attended seems non-summary style. I would be inclined to boil that down to two or three sentences. There is probably scope to trim details off Thurber's private life in many places throughout. I hope this helps.

PS You use "in Bernstein's words" four times. And "in Bernstein's view" once. Gog the Mild (talk) 19:55, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I'll have a go at trimming based on that. It's interesting to hear what is uninteresting: in this case, the failures at gym and military drill are famous within Thurber fandom, so to speak, because they are the basis for some of his most famous writing, in My Life and Hard Times. (I unconsciously spent more time/words on those events because I know that another Thurber fan would find them interesting.) But the relevant biographical material can be deferred to the article about that book. Thanks; this is helpful. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:34, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply] That looks good Mike, although you will probably want to copy edit it. "James gave multiple interview"; "says it took place in 1913.[18]." Including the notes and captions it is still a thumping ~8,500 words. Largely - IMO - because of the inclusion of what seems to me to be excessive detail. Reading through Early life and education and skimming Early career it seems to me to have too deep a level of information. Possibly a lesson on how difficult it is to write an article when one is a fan of the subject. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:13, 28 January 2026 (UTC)[reply] At work now so can't copyedit for a few hours, but will have a go; I was evidently too focused on trimming and not enough on copyediting as I trimmed. I might wait for UC's pass before trimming further; anything I left in I had a specific reason for thinking was important, though as you say being a fan clouds one's judgement. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:23, 28 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

UC

[edit]

Initially, I'm agreed with SchroCat on almost all points. I almost thought the "Legacy" section was unfinished when I got to it -- all this biography, all these works, and we can't point to a single writer he influenced, phrase that entered the lexicon, or mark he made on culture? However, pace Schro, I do think the biography is probably still a bit long.

To me it's less a matter of sheer length than of organisation: we have a lot of L2 headings, whcih start so conventional and then get a bit less so. I don't know if you're familiar with Depths of Wikipedia but they often like to lampoon similarly unusual or surprising sequences of subheadings. To wit:

  • Early life and education (fine, standard)
  • Early career (ditto)
  • First years at the New Yorker (no issue here)
  • Success, divorce and remarriage (OK, but an idiosyncratic title, and no real sense of chronology)
  • The Male Animal (likewise -- and it's three paragraphs, the first of which doesn't seem to be about the play at all, and is the place we cover Walter Mitty, almost certainly his more famous work).
  • Eye operations (that's a very unusual subhead -- and, again, a whole lot of the section has nothing to do with eyes or operations).
  • Cornwall, Connecticut (again, no major problem here, but the subheadings have now long ceased to provide any useful guidance to those who don't already know what they're looking for. Is this his late career? Early? Which works relate to it?)
  • Early 1950s (a nice clear title at least, but out of step with most of the others)
  • Mid 1950s (likewise, except it goes up to August 1958, which is probably more like the late 1950s)
  • Last years (no issue here)
  • Legacy and honors (likewise, except for its brevity and bullet points -- see above).

A couple of suggestions that might be productive:

  • A fairly "cheap" one -- stick dates on all the L2 headings, like in Mandell Creighton.
  • Keep the chronological structure as is, but try to establish a roughly three-part macro-structure -- crudely, early, middle and later life. Then stick subheadings below each one. If one section is looking like it has an unwieldy number of them, it probably needs some trimming.
  • Slightly rework the chronological structure -- perhaps have thematic sections for e.g. works (of differnet types?) and e.g. health and personal life.
  • Perhaps alongside this -- quite a few FA biographies adopt a "two pass" structure, where we first set out the skeleton of (crudely) where the subject was when, alluding only very briefly to what they did at each point, and then come back to look at their works, either chronologically or thematically. See e.g. Eduard Fraenkel, J. R. R. Tolkien, to an extent Margaret Murray. I've done the same for John Vivian, 4th Baron Swansea which, while a way off being FA quality, does show a way of dealing with someone who had multiple "stories" intertwined throughout his life.

I'm happy to do a more detailed nitpick and condense individual bits of prose down, but my sense is that it would be better to solve the length/organisation issues by looking at the whole rather than fiddling around with the parts (fill in your own Carry On–style joke there). UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:48, 28 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I've done a bit of retitling of sections, and will work on the Legacy section, probably tomorrow. I'm thinking about the "two pass" structure you mention. (I've only written one or two biographical articles, so I don't have a mental template for the best way to organize one.) The material in the article now falls into these categories:
  • Purely biographical -- education, places of residence, marriages, children, employers, honors.
  • Publications -- what he wrote and when, and how successful it was, how it got written
  • Personal -- friendships, mental struggles, personality and comments from friends, blindness, relationship with his wives, affairs, drinking
These are all mingled, probably because that's how Bernstein, Thurber's main biographer, does it, and I've been influenced by that source; also because in my mind the article is the story of his life, and stripping any of these elements out would mean to me that the reader doesn't get an accurate picture of his life. If I don't say in the section on the early 1950s that he attacked Helen, the reader doesn't understand how bad his thyroid problem was; if I don't mention the psychiatrist, the pneumonia and the peritonitis the reader doesn't feel the stress on him in the early 1940s. Not mentioning "Walter Mitty" in 1939 would be silly, but I don't want to digress at that point into commentary on the story since critical commentary is the one thing I am trying to filter out for a separate section. I accept that the article as it stands is a bit curate's-eggish, but I am not clear what I'd cut to get it to that two-part structure. Any suggestions gratefully received. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 03:35, 29 January 2026 (UTC)[reply] UC, I've now trimmed a bit more and done some more re-organization of the section titles. The length is down about 10% from when I brought it to PR. I think this is ready for another look. I did look at Eduard Fraenkel, and I think that organization works well there. I'm concerned that separating Thurber's biographical data from his publications will cut some of the connections between the two for the reader -- for example, the Monroe pieces are a reflection of early difficulties in his first marriage; giving the marriage details in a bio section and then mentioning the Monroe stories in the later section would mean having to mention Althea again in the later section. However, I can see that that organization makes for a clean reading experience -- it encapsulates parts of the article, rather than attempting to have a single narrative that covers everything related to Thurber. It would also more naturally lend itself to the analysis of his work, which needs to be somewhere. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:00, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply] As I'm imagining it, you would still mention that e.g. he wrote Walter Mitty at the relevant time in his biography, but hold off discussing more than the absolute basics of what it was about and why it's important until the later "Works" section. You can think of it as an extension of WP:SUMMARYSTYLE where the works (and perhaps the intricacies of his health, personal life etc) get a lead-style introduction in the "Biography" section and are then expounded upon more fully later. UndercoverClassicist T·C 15:46, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply] I could draft a version like that in a sandbox, if you think that would be a good next step? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:55, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply] Let me have a proper look at what you've got first: no sense advising you to rework it all if the current version is perfectly serviceable. UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:05, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

SchroCat

[edit]

Hi Mike,

Happy to have a look over, once UC has had their say. The only things I will say now is that:

  • There needs to be some form of analysis of his works, writing style, themes, characterisations, etc (one of my very first forays into FAC was opposed for not having such a section and I think the desire to have one has strengthened since).
  • I don't have a problem with the length as it is at the moment, but once you have an analysis section length will probably be an issue for some people
  • Legacy/honours: can we turn the bullet points into a prosey paragraph?

I'll be back once UC's had their say, but please ping me if I look like I've forgotten. Cheers - SchroCat (talk) 06:03, 27 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks; I should be able to get done with the last of Tim's comments in a day or so. Re the analysis section: Tim & Gog suggest above that it might not be necessary so long as there's a link to another article that does that. I've been unsure about taking this to FAC because I am not sure I can do a good job on an analysis section, so if others agree that would be good news for me. However, TIm, has said he might be able to help with a "Works" article, and if we do that and a summary-style version of it ends up back in this article that would also address the issue. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:50, 27 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

MOS:SEASON

[edit]

Khajidha, per this conversation I have made some MOS:SEASON changes. Three of the six you pointed out are fixed, but there are a couple where the source is not clear enough for an easy change:

  • Over the winter of 1941–1942 he had an affair with a secretary and In the winter of 1938–1939 he wrote "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"; the story was published in the March 18, 1939: for both of these the source only says "winter" and gives no more precise dates.
  • He and Helen had hoped to stay in Cornwall over the winter of 1942–1943, but the fuel oil they needed to heat the house was unavailable because of wartime rationing, so they returned to New York in January. I think the point here is the temperature, so I think it's justified to keep the word "winter".

If you have any suggestions about how the three remaining sentences you identified can be improved, that would be great. Thanks. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:17, 28 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This article is sourced from Wikipedia. Content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.