Status
Available
Genres
Publication
New York, Harcourt Brace and Company [1948]
Description
These twenty-three humorous stories and essays and more than one hundred illustrations find James Thurber in absolutely top form. The book concludes with a sampling of articles Thurber wrote for the New Yorker’s “The Talk of the Town,” demonstrating his often overlooked skill as a reporter.
User reviews
LibraryThing member annbury
One of the best books by James Thurber, who has to my mind become one of the great undervalued writers of 20th century America. He is perhaps best known now for his cartoons, of which several of the most famous (including "All right, have it your way -- you heard a seal bark") are in this book. But
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he was also a masterful writer of short stories, humorous sketches, and essays on a wide range of topics. This book includes several of each, including the series of five essays on soap opera he wrote for the New Yorker in the late 1940's. Thurber's writing is as supple and spare as his cartoons, and his humor profound. Show Less
LibraryThing member nmele
It's amazing how timeless most of this collection of Thurber pieces is--a longish, five chapter essay on radio soap operas, despite referring to long gone serials, is quite interesting and informed by irony, and even a collection of "Talk of the Town" bits written by Thurber in the 1920s and 1930s
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stand on their own, although I had to google "Ely Culbertson" to really understand the two pieces about contract bridge games. Show Less
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
A collection of the cartoons, and short pieces mostly from the New Yorker by the American literary figure. Some of the Cartoons are classics ("Touche", and "This is the present Mrs. Hampshire!" This is material he wrote prior to 1948, and many of the pieces are journalism rather than entertainment.
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There s his long history of radio soap operas and the history of the evolution of the crossword puzzle. Show Less