Writings and drawings / James Thurber.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Thurber, James, 1894-1961.

Contributor:

Keillor, Garrison, editor.

The Library of Chaim Potok (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Library of America ; 90.

The Library of America ; 90

Standardized Title:

Works. Selections. 1996

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Humorous stories, American.

American wit and humor, Pictorial.

Penn Provenance:

Potok, Adena (autograph) (donor) (Potok Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xiii pages, 1 unnumbered page, 1004 pages, 6 unnumbered pages : illustrations ; 21 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Library of America : [Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Books USA Inc], [1996]

Summary:

The Library of America and editor Garrison Keillor present 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. 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, and his other famous collections, including such favorites as "The Pet Department", "The Black Magic of Barney Haller", "Nine Needles", "The Macbeth Murder Mystery", and "File and Forget": 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 celebrated sequences like "The Masculine Approach" and "The War Between Men and Women" and his devastatingly straightforward illustrated versions ofonce-canonical poems such as "Barbara Frietchie" and "Excelsior". Rounding out the volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, his memoir of New Yorker publisher Harold Ross, and a number of pieces uncollected by Thurber, including a few wonderful early ones never before reprinted.

Contents:

from Is Sex Necessary (1929)

from The Owl in the Attic (1931)

The Seal in the Bedroom (1932)

My Life and Hard Times (1933)

from The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935)

from Let Your Mind Alone! (1937)

The Last Flower (1939)

from Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940)

from My World - And Welcome To It (1942)

from Men, Women and Dogs (1943)

from The Thurber Carnival (1945)

from The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948)

The 13 Clocks (1950)

from The Thurber Album (1952)

from Thurber Country (1953)

from Thurber's Dogs (1955)

from Further Fables for Our Time (1956)

from Alarms and Diversions (1957)

from The Years with Ross (1958)

Uncollected Pieces.

Notes:

"Volume compilation, notes, and chronology copyright © 1996 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. ..."

"Garrison Keillor selected the contents for this volume."

"This book is set un 10 point Linotron Galliard, a face designed for photocomposition by Matthew Carter and based on the sixteenth-century face Granjon."

"Designed by Bruce Campbell."

Publisher's advertisements: [2] pages at end.

Local Notes:

Potok Collection copy presented to the Penn Libraries by Adena Potok.

Potok Collection copy: dust jacket retained.

Potok Collection copy inscribed in English and Hebrew "To Us, when the writer asks for ..., in addition to ... Love, Adena Dec. '96".

ISBN:

1883011221

OCLC:

34473991