James Thurber (1894–1961)

I grew up with a couple of little books of Thurber highlights, and had the idea of him as an off-beat humorist, someone who would put surreal seals and hippopotami into domestic scenes and delicately undermine the staid course of mid-century American mediocrity by giving downtrodden husbands an escape into the world of the imagination (“Walter Mitty”) and office-workers a chance to fantasise about taking revenge on evil co-workers (“The cat-bird seat”). When you read him in bulk like show more this, you get a different perspective: the subversive humour is still there, of course, but it’s part of a systematic, organised journalistic career in which Thurber came to see that making people laugh was a marketable skill he had. Like any successful humorist, he had to be a disciplined, organised writer who could cut everything unnecessary out of his work and avoid treading on editors’ or readers’ toes, while meeting deadlines and wordcounts. Seeing “behind the scenes” might take some of the magic away, but it gives you more admiration for his professionalism.

I enjoyed revisiting the celebrated cartoons and comic stories, of course, but some of the most interesting writing here turned out to be from My life and hard times (1933), about his childhood and adolescence in Columbus, Ohio, and The years with Ross (1958), about the early days of the New Yorker when he worked with Harold Ross and E B White. In both cases there is obviously a certain amount of embroidery going on — Thurber is not the sort of person to let boring facts get in the way of a good anecdote — but he manages to give some fascinating glimpses into what it was like living in a provincial US city before the Great War and into how the world of weekly magazines worked in the 1920s and 30s.

Otherwise, there are a few fun things here I didn’t know about, like the apocalyptic graphic fable The last flower (1939), and an earlier graphic fable The race of life (1932), in which a protean family of man woman and child suffers all kinds of normal adventures (weather, hunger, etc.) before coming face to face with a totally unexplained Giant Rabbit. Both of these are also fun because of the way they manage to sneak in large amounts of nudity without ever being prurient or erotic about it. show less

Somewhere along the line -- largely because of The 13 Clocks, I'm guessing -- Thurber has suffered the same fate as Mark Twain in that he's become known as an avuncular old man who told some funny stories and was generally amusing. You'll be disabused of that notion pretty quickly after you finish this book. Go read "The Fairly Intelligent Fly" or "The Sheep in Wolf's Clothing" if you don't believe me. Thurber happens to be hilarious, but he bites.

We had a copy of this book on our vast bookshelves when I was a child. Thurber was a favorite of mine because of his wonderful, wonky drawings. As I grew out of toddlerhood, I loved having his stories read to me, and then began to read them myself. ( I really fell in love with The Last Flower. It came out around the same time as Where Have All the Flowers Gone and I would drive my family nuts singing while engaged in the pictures.) Still later, I read the short stories myself, and knew them show more well enough that at a very young age I wrote a poem in tribute to Walter Mitty (whose story is in this book), and won a prize for it. Alas that copy, which looked like the one pictured here, is no longer in my personal library. But when we found a box of give-away free books while walking on Locust Street here in Philly, I grabbed it. Yes it's paperback, and yellowed. Yes, its cover price was $2.75 and it has a price sticker from Encore Books for $1.00. But it has beloved Thurber sketches and witty, wonderful stories. I had to rescue it and let it feel the love I've carried for it for almost 70 years. Rounded up, because of love. show less

This is one of the coolest children's books I've ever read, and I read a decent amount (you wanna fight about it?).

While a simple tale on the surface, clever wordplay and interesting ambiguity leads to a fantastic read.

I read the edition with an introduction by Neil Gaiman, who is quite the wordsmith himself. Even he had trouble saying what kind of story this is. It's a hard one to pin down, so all I can really say about it that will make any amount of sense is how it made me feel.

This show more book made me feel exactly how I always thought I was supposed to feel when I finally read Alice in Wonderland, but didn't.

Alice in Wonderland, I was always told, is filled with clever wordplay. It's a book that's not about the story, it's about what's beneath the story. It's about a clever man having fun toying with the English language. Unfortunately Alice in Wonderland may have been written too long ago, because I experienced little of that when I read it.

This, on the other hand, is from the fifties. Still not new, but new enough that I was able to get that second layer of meaning from it which made it engaging and thought-provoking. This all on top of the tale itself, which is a lot of fun all on its own. show less