It all started in Columbus

You could take James Thurber out of Columbus, which is exactly what his first wife did when she decided his talent was too big for Ohio's capital city, but you could never take Columbus out of Thurber. His hometown and the people he knew growing up and in his early newspaper career there remained the focus of his work for the rest of his life.

Bob Hunter, a former sports columnist at Thurber's old paper, The Columbus Dispatch, takes a detailed look at Thurber's life in Columbus and the stories it inspired in Thurberville.

In 48 relatively short chapters, Hunter writes about the people. places and things from Columbus that later showed up in his writing, usually fictionalized, but not by much. These include family members, boyhood friends, girlfriends, professors and fellow students at Ohio State and people he worked with in his newspaper career before he fled to New York City, joined the staff at The New Yorker and became famous.

Who was the real Walter Mitty? What inspired "The Day the Dam Broke"? Who might Thurber have had in mind when he drew those cartoons of large, intimidating women? Hunter tells all, and it turns out that all started in Columbus.

Thurberville manages to be a full biography of the great American humorist, arguably second only to Mark Twain. It takes us from birth to death, but even though much of that life was lived in New York and Paris, Columbus always remained its center. And it lies at the center of Hunter's book as well.

Hunter includes a few photographs in his book, but far too few. What the book really lacks is a map of Columbus showing readers exactly where the many homes where the Thurber family lived were located, as well as the locations of the other places mentioned. I am fairly familiar with Columbus, having been there many, many times, but even so I couldn't place houses, hotels, parks, etc., with simply an address as a guide.