James Thurber

Writings and Drawings

"'That insane American and depraved artist' is how Winston Churchill slyly characterized James Grover Thurber upon their meeting in the south of France in the 1930s, and Thurber, the shy Midwesterner—at least in his writings—couldn't have been happier. Our generation's essential Midwesterner—Garrison Keillor, has selected four complete works along with a broad array of short pieces, cartoons and drawings (what Thurber called 'doodles') for The Library of America's James Thurber: Writings and Drawings. A first-rate chronology accompanies the collection, which retells, among other things, the story of how Thurber, renowned for his zaniness and skewed world view, suffered throughout his life from depression and anxiety.

—New York Times Book Review, November 10, 1996

"The Thurber man is dressed in a suit. His shoulders are round. He is small and balding, although sometimes seen with a hat pushed back from his brow. His chin and neck are of a piece, and his eyebrows are arched in perpetual alarm or confusion. He has the look of a man who has just awakened in a strange room. His lack of physical impressiveness is all the more impressive when he is pictured, as he often is, cowering next to a woman, usually his wife, who is invariably large and imposing. There is never any doubt who wears the pants in the family of the Thurber Man.

...[T]he larger world, as Thurber wants his reader to understand it—is a queer place, where the odd and the normal are hard to distinguish, a place that fairly jumps with the potential for embarrassment and mortification. This is why the Thurber Man has that look of perpetual alarm. There is simply no way to predict what lurks around the next corner, and no reason to assume it won't be trouble. Thurber renders this world without apparent effort, as a fact of nature, in a plain prose as lovely as an American writer has given us."

—Harrison Kinney, The Weekly Standard, December 16, 1996

Copyright 1995–2007 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.
Contact Us | Privacy and Security