James Thurber Books

What fun it is to visit an old friend. I stumbled upon "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"? in my grade school years, and soon discovered this book on my parents' bookshelves. It has recently returned to me, part of the distribution of objects from the homestead when my Mother moved to the mountains. Thurber's style and language are antique but his enthusiasm and inquisitive nature remain fresh. He was a masterful, inventive and whimsical essayist, and his cartoons are still paradoxically light and dark at once. He was a humorist never far from the grim. After my forty years between, immersed in televisionisms and mushy prose, it is a delight to re-read one of the 20th Century's great stylists. In tackling word butchery, he writes: "The word 'insecurity' by the way, seems to have been taken over by the psychiatrists as their personal property. In politics, as in penology, 'security' itself has come to mean 'insecurity.' Take for example, this sentence: 'He was considered a 'maximum security' prisoner because of his police record and was never allowed out of his cell block.' ... "... I could prove that 'maximum' in the case of the prisoner mentioned above, really means 'minimum,' but I don't want to get us in so deep that we can't get out." And later he writes: "'It's a bad city to get something in your eye in,' the nurse said. 'Yes,' the interne agreed, 'but there isn't a better place to get something in your eye out in.' I rushed past them with my hair in my wild eyes, and left the hospital." Everyday people, politicos, crooks (and crooked politicos), the battle between the sexes, literature, modern art -- all fall under his wild eye and practiced hand. If you haven't read Thurber in a while, get thee to a library and sample one or two. Like a wine tasting, it will leave your palate cleansed.

Very rarely does any book delve into the mysterious world of the political consultant; in fact, these key players are merely treated as scenery by many other accounts. Thurber and Nelson's account suggests otherwise. CAMPAIGN WARRIORS is a compilation of articles that probes deeply into both the professional and personal lives of these political workers. The book takes a comprehensive approach to the study of the political consultant, analyzing the ultimate effect that they have on the electoral and decision-making process. Party relations, the amount of money available to political campaigns, and the degree of professionalization in House elections are all factors that are explored through the mention of consultants. An appendix in the book focuses on consultants as a demographic group. The prose is a bit technical at times, but only when discussing relevant statistics that the authors have acquired through surveys conducted at local, state, and national levels. However, that the authors were able to shed so much light on the doings of these behind-the-scenes workers in only 200 pages, makes this book all in all a good read.

Who would guess that E.B. White of Charlotte's Web fame would team up with James Thurber to write a spoof of the sex guides that were published during the "sexual revolution." The satire is excellent -- reminiscent of Twain. Though this book is hard to find, it's worth searching out for a quick read. They just don't write books like this anymore. Thurber's drawings are very funny, as is the writing all the way through.

THIS COLLECTION WERE CHOOSEN FROM THOSE APPEARING IN THE "NEW YORKER" DURING IT'S FIRST 15 1/2 YEARS OF PUBLICATION--FEBRUARY 1925---TO SEPTEMBER 1940.....THE COLLECTION IS A GREAT REVIEW OF SOME OF AMERIC'S GREAT WRITERS IN THE EARY 1900'S, AND DEAL WITH FACT AND FICTION---A WELL CHOSEN COLLECTION AND WORTHY OF STUDY, FOR THE WRITER OF TODAY.. ONE CAN ALWAY'S LEARN FROM THE OLD PROS.

James Thurber, best remembered today as the creator of Walter Mitty, is one of the group of staff writers who earned The New Yorker its reputation as the "greatest magazine in the world, perhaps the best that ever was," as the old commercial used to inform us. There were several different types of writers in that group, the infamously long essays were turned out by folks like Joseph Mitchell and Berton Roueche (my two favorites), while shorter pieces, drawings, poems, etc., were the province of Thurber, Robert Benchley, E. B. White and several other polymaths. Considering the range of his duties, that he was writing for a weekly magazine, and the length of his career (the pieces in this collection span a period from 1929 to 1961), you could probably fill numerous volumes with Thurber's work and indeed there are plenty of collections of his varied output available, many published during his life but many others posthumous.

Though he would not be considered a crime writer, this book happens to be organized around the topic of crime, and that serves to give it a thematic coherence that a random anthology would lack. Included are drawings, stories, and articles that cover a whole range of topics, fiction and nonfiction. Plenty of folks only look at the cartoons in The New Yorker, and if you enjoy that style of humor, you'll enjoy Thurber's drawings. His artwork borders on the amateurish--and since he eventually went blind, it got worse as he went along--but it's certainly distinctive.

Most all of the stories are written with the wry wit for which Thurber was best known--in his Introduction, Donald E. Westlake calls it "gentle comedy." There's an especially good true tale about an employee who stole tens of thousands of dollars from Harold Ross, the magazine's publisher, before being caught. Though ostensibly an attempt to understand the thief, who ended up committing suicide, Thurber turns it into an opportunity to poke fun at Ross.

But far and away the best thing in the book, and one of the best stories I've ever read, is "The Macbeth Murder Mystery." An American woman visiting an English hotel accidentally grabs The Tragedy of Macbeth instead of one of the cheap mysteries she intended. Undaunted, she simply reads the play as a whodunit, and to the narrator's astonishment, decides that the Macbeths are not guilty. Her explanations, full of perfectly rational references to the traditions and conventions of the detective genre, eventually ensnare the narrator and the reader, and when, by the end of the story, he's offered his own solution to the mystery and is ready to take on Hamlet, we too are carried away by the demented logic of the tale.

The book's worth reading for that story alone; the rest is gravy.

GRADE : B+

James Thurber was blind in one eye from the age of six and nearly totally blind for the last years of his life, but he still managed to publish stories and essays free of misspellings and grammatical and typographical errors. Too bad he died in 1961, because Thomas Fensch could have used Thurber's help as an editor and proof reader. This book, published in 2000, evinces a genuine enthusiasm for Thurber, but a typical page has multiple misspellings and typographical errors. If this is the future of publishing, the future is likely to be short.

James Thurber was blind in one eye from the age of six and nearly totally blind for the last years of his life, but he still managed to publish stories and essays free of misspellings and grammatical and typographical errors.

Too bad he died in 1961, because Thomas Fensch could have used Thurber's help as an editor and proof reader. This book, published in 2000, evinces a genuine enthusiasm for Thurber, but a typical page has multiple misspellings and typographical errors. If this is the future of publishing, the future is likely to be short.

This clever collection of literary oddities will delight all Thurber fans. Consisting of three parts, the book reads swiftly, while bringing smiles of amusement. MR. AND MRS. MONROE consists of multiple tales about a New York city couple in their mid thirties. Each one tries to impress, manipulate or outdo the other in various marital escapades, yet they are sympathethic characters with no evil intentions. The little Mrs. protects her husband from a predatory female in a truly creative manner. Like Walter Mitty, Mr. Monroe entertains
grandiose male visions in his secret life--both re extramarital affairs and facing burglars. This section is somewhat sentimental and obviously dated, but definitely entertaining.

Part II, THE PET DEPARTMENT, was taken from Thurber's column: Questions (presumably but not necessarily from actual readers) and Answers--clearly from the author's non-veterinarian but fertile imagination. His curious pen and ink sketches clarify many obscure pet problems or solutions; the anthology's title was inspired by a query about a (stuffed) owl in somebody's attic.

Part III is a linguistic gem called A LADIES AND GENTLEMEN'S GUIDE TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR--which I do not recommend to serious foreign students of our language. They will be confused enough without Thurber's well-intentioned advice. Using ridiculous circumstances to illustrate difficult grammatical problems, traditional errors and embarrassing pitfalls, Thurber dazzles his readers as he attempts serious language instruction for those scribblers who insist on writing over their heads. Undaunted he attacks such stumbling blocks
as Which, Whether and the ubiquitously subline Subjunctive.
Examining their entrapment capabilities under a microscope, he
dissects them with the precision of his witty scalpel. Read and be warned: Be sure to keep your notes to absent friends brief but grammatically correct! (Teaching English was never like this...)

People Have More Fun Than Anybody collects 19 of Thurber's stories/articles/letters, several cartoons, and one recipe that have been previously uncollected. Surely this is a classification that would have amused Thurber no end--are they now "non-uncollected" stories? In "Help! Help! Another Classificationization" Thurber sets himself against exactly this mindset. And frankly, at this late date in the late humorist's career, such a criteria for inclusion assures that the book will not bring us the best of his work.

However, Thurber is almost always witty, and even though some of the pieces are dated and irrelevant, all of the writings evoke at least a smile. The cartoons don't fare as well, some of them being merely puzzling. The end notes tell us that some cartoons had different captions in their original stages. The most wildly different is a picture of a woman leaning forward and speaking intently to a man. The published caption is "If I told you a dream I had about you, Mr. Price, would you promise not to do anyting about it unless you really want to?", but the earlier caption on Thurber's original drawing was "If they never found the husband's body could they do anything to the wife?"

This is essentially a collection for the die-hard Thurber fan (who are rather few on the ground these days, it seems) only. Others will probably do better to read The Thurber Carnival.