[1] Due to overcrowding in his grandfather's house, where his family had moved while his father recovered from an illness, Thurber often stayed at the home of his aunt, Margery Albright.

Albright lived in Downtown Columbus near Holy Cross Church, the clock and bell of which Thurber would reference in later writing.

From 1913 to 1918, Thurber attended Ohio State University where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and editor of the student magazine, the Sundial.

He never graduated from the university because his poor eyesight prevented him from taking a mandatory Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) course.

During part of this time, he reviewed books, films, and plays in a weekly column called "Credos and Curios", a title that was given to a posthumous collection of his work.

[citation needed] Thurber married Althea Adams in 1922, although the marriage, as he later wrote to a friend, devolved into "a relationship charming, fine, and hurting".

[16] After meeting Mark Van Doren on a ferry to Martha's Vineyard, Thurber began summering in Cornwall, Connecticut, along with many other prominent artists and authors of the time.

His best-known short stories are "The Dog That Bit People" and "The Night the Bed Fell"; they can be found in My Life and Hard Times, which was his "break-out" book.

Among his other classics are "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", "The Catbird Seat", "The Night the Ghost Got In", "A Couple of Hamburgers", "The Greatest Man in the World", and "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox".

These were short stories that featured anthropomorphic animals (e.g. "The Little Girl and the Wolf", his version of Little Red Riding Hood) as main characters, and ended with a moral as a tagline.

Thurber's fables were satirical, and the morals served as punch lines as well as advice to the reader, demonstrating "the complexity of life by depicting the world as an uncertain, precarious place, where few reliable guidelines exist.

[29] Thurber wrote a five-part New Yorker series, between 1947 and 1948, examining in depth the radio soap opera phenomenon, based on near-constant listening and researching over the same period.

Leaving nearly no element of these programs unexamined, including their writers, producers, sponsors, performers, and listeners alike, Thurber republished the series in his anthology, The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948), under the section title "Soapland."

The last drawing Thurber completed was a self-portrait in yellow crayon on black paper, which was featured as the cover of Time magazine on July 9, 1951.