James Thurber - Free Library Land Online - Crime

The 13 Clocks

Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300

How can anyone describe this book? It isn't a parable, a fairy story, or a poem, but rather a mixture of all three. It is beautiful and it is comic. It is philosophical and it is cheery. What we suppose we are trying fumblingly to say is, in a word, that it is Thurber. There are only a few reasons why everybody has always wanted to read this kind of story: if you have always wanted to love a Princess; if you always wanted to be a Prince; if you always wanted the wicked Duke to be punished; or if you always wanted to live happily ever after. Too little of this kind of thing is going on in the world today. But all of it is going on valorously in The 13 Clocks.

The Wonderful O

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 18:50:17 +0300

Great American humorist James Thurber's beloved and madcap fairy tale about an island society robbed of the wonders of the letter O—in a stunning Deluxe Edition featuring the original, full-color illustrations

Littlejack has a map that indicates the existence of a treasure on a far and lonely island, and Black has a ship to get there. So the two bad men team up and sail off on Black's vessel, the Aeiu. The name, Black explains, is all the vowels except for O—which he hates since his mother got wedged in a porthole: They couldn't pull her in, so they had to push her out. Black and Littlejack arrive at the port and demand the treasure. No one knows anything about it, so they have their henchmen ransack the place—to no avail. But Black has a better idea: He will take over the island and purge it of O.

The harsh limits of a life sans O (where shoe is she and woe is we) and how finally with a little luck and lots of pluck the islanders...

The Years with Ross

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 21:41:48 +0200

From iconic American humorist James Thurber, a celebrated and poignant memoir about his years at The New Yorker with the magazine's unforgettable founder and longtime editor, Harold Ross

"Extremely entertaining. . . . life at The New Yorker emerges as a lovely sort of pageant of lunacy, of practical jokes, of feuds and foibles. It is an affectionate picture of scamps playing their games around a man who, for all his brusqueness, loved them, took care of them, pampered and scolded them like an irascible mother hen." —New York Times

With a foreword by Adam Gopnik and illustrations by James Thurber

At the helm of America's most influential literary magazine from 1925 to 1951, Harold Ross introduced the country to a host of exciting talent, including Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Ogden Nash, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Dorothy Parker. But no one could have written about this irascible, eccentric...

Writings and Drawings

Sat, 26 Oct 1996 18:50:17 +0300

James Thurber was the unique, unpredictable wild card of American humorists, at once whimsical fantasist and deadpan chronicler of everyday absurdities. The comic persona he invented, a modern citydweller whose zaniest flights of free association are tinged with anxiety, is as hilarious now as when he first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker—and his troubled side is even more striking. Here, The Library of America presents the best and most extensive Thurber collection ever assembled. Only a book of this scope can do justice to Thurber’s extraordinary career and to the many unexpected turns of his comic genius. Here are the acknowledged masterpieces: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “The Catbird Seat,” the anti-war parable The Last Flower, the brilliantly satirical Fables for Our Time, the children’s classic The 13 Clocks, and My Life and Hard Times, which Russell Baker calls “possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written.” Here too are the best pieces from The Owl in the Attic, Let Your Mind Alone!, My World—And Welcome To It, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals. From his other famous collections are included such favorites as “The Pet Department,” “The Black Magic of Barney Haller,” "Nine Needles,’ “the Macbeth Murder Mystery,” and “File and Forget,” revealing an astonishingly diverse mix of literary parodies, eccentric portraits, stories of domestic warfare and inner terror, reminiscences both tender and farcical, extravagant feats of wordplay, freewheeling burlesques of popular culture (from detective novels to self-help fads), and exasperated protests against the mechanized impersonality of the modern world. Thurber’s wonderful drawings—spontaneous creations of which he once said, “I don’t think any drawing ever took me more than three minutes”—are here in profusion, with their population of husbands, wives, dogs, seals, and various species of Thurber’s own invention. His first great cartoon collection, The Seal in the Bedroom, is presented complete, along with such celebrated sequences like “The Masculine Approach” and “The War Between Men and Women,” and his devastatingly straightforward illustrated versions of once-canonical poems such as “Barbara Frietchie” and “Excelsior.” Rounding out this volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, his memoir of New Yorker publisher Harold Ross, and a number of pieces, previously uncollected by Thurber, including some early work never before reprinted.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:05:04 +0300

The very best of James Thurber's hilarious short stories and essays, to tie-in with the major new film starring Ben Stiller and Kristen Wiig.

Walter Mitty is an ordinary man living an ordinary life. But he has dreams - vivid, extraordinary day dreams - in which the life he leads is one of excitement and even adventure, in which he - a weary, put upon middle-aged man - is the hero of his own story.

A man can dream, can't he?

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is just one of the brilliant humorous and witty stories written by James Thurber and collected here.

James Thurber was born in 1894 at Columbus, Ohio, where, as he once said, so many awful things happened to him. After university (Ohio State) he worked at the American Embassy in Paris from 1918 to 1920, and then turned to journalism. From 1927 onwards he was on the staff of the New Yorker, and first published much of his...

The Thurber Carnival

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 15:25:09 +0200

The hilarious writing of James Thurber, author of 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty', collected in this classic anthology.This collection brings together the best of James Thurber's brilliantly funny, eccentric and anarchic writings. It includes his most famous work, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which an ordinary man's fantasies have a more powerful hold on him than reality, as well as essays, poetry and cartoons gathered from all of Thurber's collections. Making fun of his own weaknesses and those of other people (and dogs) - the English teacher who looked only at figures of speech, the Airedale who refused to include him in the family, the botany lecturer who despaired of him totally - James Thurber is a true original, whose off-beat imagination shows us everyday life from a different angle.James Thurber was born in 1894 at Columbus, Ohio, where, as he once said, so many awful things happened to him. After...

Collected Fables

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 11:09:33 +0200

Published to coincide with the 125th anniversary of James Thurber's birth, this treasury combines, for the first time, Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time with Thurber's unpublished preface and ten previously uncollected or unpublished stories. James Thurber has been called "one of the world's greatest humorists" by Alistair Cooke (Atlantic), "one of our great American institutions" (Stanley Walker), "a magnificent satirist" (Boston Transcript)—and few works reveal Thurber's genius as powerfully as his fables. Perennially entertaining and astutely satirical, Thurber pinpricks the idiosyncrasies of life with verbal frivolity, hilarious insights, political shrewdness, and, of course, quirky, quotable morals. Now, readers can savor 85 fables by the twentieth century's preeminent humorist collected for the first time in a single anthology: Fables for Our Time, Further Fables for Our Time, Thurber's unpublished preface, and ten previously...

Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 17:46:12 +0200