Thurber, James

The 13 Clocks

Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile, and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales.

So begins James Thurber’s sublimely revamped fairy tale, The 13 Clocks, in which a wicked Duke who imagines he has killed time, and the Duke’s beautiful niece, for whom time seems to have run out, both meet their match, courtesy of an enterprising and very handsome prince in disguise. Readers young and old will take pleasure in this tale of love forestalled but ultimately fulfilled, admiring its upstanding hero (”He yearned to find in a far land the princess of his dreams, singing as he went, and possibly slaying a dragon here and there”) and unapologetic villain (”We all have flaws,” the Duke said. “Mine is being wicked”), while wondering at the enigmatic Golux, the mysterious stranger whose unpredictable interventions speed the story to its necessarily happy end.

My Life and Hard Times (Perennial Classics)

Widely hailed as one of the finest humorist of the twentieth century, James Thurber looks back at his own life growing up in Columbus, Ohio, with the same humor and sharp wit that defined his famous sketches and writings. In My Life and Hard times, first published in 1933, he recounts the delightful chaos and frustrations of family, boyhood, youth odd dogs, recalcitrant machinery, and the foibles of human nature.

Many Moons

Thurber: Writings and Drawings (Library of America)

The shy Midwesterner James Thurber became a famed cartoonist and humor writer almost, it seems, by accident: Thurber in person was often depressed and self-conscious, darker strains that emerge fitfully in his sly, absurdist work. Garrison Keillor, a sunnier brand of Midwestern humorist, has assembled four longer works with many of Thurber's drawings and short pieces for the Library of America edition of Thurber's selected works. Many of these cartoons and writings are now classics, and Thurber's edgy, modernist humor--not to mention his usually bewildered protagonists--has influenced many of the best cartoonists today.

Fables for Our Time (Harper Colophon Books, Cn/999)

James Thurber has been called "one of our great American institutions' (Stanley Walker), "a magnificent satirist (Boston Transcript), and "a Joyce in false-face" (New York Times). The New York Herald Tribune submits that he is "as blithe as Benchley...as savage as Swift...surprisingly wise and witty," while the Times of London, out of enthusiasm and a profound regard for truth, proclaims that "Thurber is Thurber."

In Fables for Our Time, Thurber the Moralist is in the ascendancy. Here are a score or more lessons-in-prose dedicated to conventional sinners and proving--what you will. The fables are imperishably illustrated, and are supplemented by Mr. Thurber's own pictorial interpretations of famous poems in a wonderful and joyous assemblage.

Selected Shorts: Timeless Classics (Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story)

My World-and Welcome to It (Harvest Book)

The Dog Department: James Thurber on Hounds, Scotties, and Talking Poodles

"On the lawns and porches, and in the living rooms and backyards of my threescore years, there have been more dogs, written and drawn, real and imaginary, than I had guessed before I started this roundup."

Here is James Thurber, arguably the greatest humorist of the twentieth century, on all things canine. In The Dog Department, Michael J. Rosen, a literary dogcatcher of sorts, has gathered together Thurber's best in show. Here we have the stylish prose and drawings from Thurber's Dogs (which connected the words "Thurber" and "Dog" as inseparably as "Bartlett" and "Quotation," as "Emily Post" and "Etiquette"), along with unpublished material from the Thurber archives, a great sheaf of uncollected cartoons, and two dozen "Talk of the Town" miniatures from The New Yorker — the consummate dog book from an artist of extraordinary pedigree. What other author can claim to have penned his own personal breed? The Thurber hound is a creature as unmistakable as Disney's mouse or Playboy's bunny.

In The Dog Department you'll find standard poodles, Scottish terriers, an Airedale, a rough collie, an American Staffordshire terrier — all Thurber family members who inspired quintessential dog tales. For instance, there's Muggs, "the dog that bit people," an avocation that, each year, required Thurber's mother to send her famous chocolates to an ever-growing list of Muggs's victims. There's also a fair share about bloodhounds, German shepherd dogs, and pugs. But what you'll find remarkable and comforting is that reading Thurber from fifty or even seventy-five years ago is akin to reading about dogs today — or about dogs from the previous century, as Thurber grew up reading — or about dogs, we hope, from this new century we've just entered. The Dog Department is proof that Thurber's work defines the canine canon.

The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Other Pieces (Penguin Modern Classics)