James Thurber  (1894-1961) The Greatest Man in the World LINKS No links found. BIOGRAPHY James Thurber (1894–1961)  Born in Columbus, Ohio, Thurber went through the local public schools and graduated from Ohio State University. He began his writing career as a reporter, first for an Ohio newspaper, and later in Paris and New York City, before he became a staff member of the New Yorker. There he wrote the humorous satirical essays and fables (often illustrated with his whimsical drawings of people and animals) upon which his reputation rests—the most famous being "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." In 1929, he and another New Yorker staffer, E. B. White, wrote Is Sex Necessary? or, Why You Feel the Way You Do, a spoof of the increasingly popular new psychological theories. In 1933, he published his humorous autobiography, My Life and Hard Times. With Elliott Nugent, he wrote The Male Animal (1940), a comic play that pleads for academic freedom, and, in 1959, he memorialized his associates at the New Yorker in The Years with Ross.