James Thurber: Writings and Drawings (Library of America) »

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 of once-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.

Library Journal

This work represents each decade of Thurber's writing career, from the slight New Yorker sketches of the 1920s to the irreverently affectionate portrait of that magazine's founder, The Years with Ross, of the late 1950s. Keillor's selection of Thurber's oeuvre is both the most generous and the most judicious volume available. Known largely for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1939), which dramatizes the battle of the sexes and the male animal's ineptitude in the face of modern technology, Thurber was an Algonquin stylist with a wide range of talents. These talents are effectively displayed here in the self-deprecating reminiscences of his eccentric Columbus, Ohio, family; beast fables with a cutting edge; and almost 500 inimitable line drawings. A valuable work; highly recommended for all libraries.Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.