James Thurber (1894–1961)

It's obviously very silly but it has the decency to recognize itself as such.
The 13 Clocks could be a master class on figurative language. Monsters and described monstrously, jewels are described jewelishly, killing time necessitates hours and seconds to bleed out onto the floor. It's an important detail too many authors completely forget. Why tell me that your beloved is like the morning sun when you can have her literally melt snow and provoke birds into song?

The last of Thurber's works before his death. I was worried that it might be, like many author's late works, less than his earlier, especially since his best works are those dealing with his family and his youth. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Thurber had fully embraced old-fartdom by the time he wrote this, and his grumpy writings about the foibles of growing old, interacting with children, and even doctors and nurses are classic comedy. I especially loved the various word games he show more played throughout the book, though I'm afraid I might lie awake at night trying to explore the letter P. Highly recommended for anyone who appreciates self-deprecatory humor. show less

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

Great Thurber, which is to say great humor, and great cartoons. He wrote the first 10 essays included in this book in the late 1930's in response to the flood of self-help books then (and now) flooding the market. He examines several then-popular approaches to pop psych, and skewers them most effectively -- amazing how little pop psyche has changed over all these years, and all this research. The rest of the book consists of twenty-eight essays and short stories, including classics like "The show more Breaking Up Of the Winships". Laugh out loud funny, the first time you read it, or the fifth. show less