Description
This selection presents what I think is Thurber at his best. I have tried to make it representative of every period in his writing life - except for what always used to be known as juvenilia. It does not include any straight journalism or, except in 'The Lady on the Bookcase', any pictorial jokes. In these categories I am sad to have left out 'Soapland', a series of articles describing in vivid terms the world of the daytime radio soap-operas, and The Last Flower, a picture book with minimal captions depicting the fall and rise of civilisation - wonderfully hopeful considering its year of publication, 1939.
I have not attempted to date the stories but I have put them in order of their publication in collections. The titles and dates of the collections themselves are included in the Contents and there is, therefore, reasonable assurance that the order in this book represents roughly the order of composition. I have reprinted only those drawings which were included in the collections made before Thurber died in 1961.
The impression of the writer which one get from the stories seems largely to suggest Thurber as he really was. His bad eyesight, which prompts many of his funniest situations, stemmed from his loss of an eye as a child of six, accidentally shot with an arrow by his brother while playing at William Tell. In 1940, at the age of forty-six, he suffered five operations on the remaining eye and was left with only minimum vision: he was practically blind for the last fourteen years of his life. He died in 1961 shortly before his sixty-seventh birthday. The great influences in his life were Harold Ross, who hired Thurber in 1927 as an editor, and later as a writer, for the New Yorker, and E. B. (Andy) White with whom Thurber shared an office at the New Yorker. Thurber's first success was the skit on psychiatry which he and White wrote together Is Sex Necessary? and which became a best-seller on publication in 1929. Ross died in 1952 and in 1958 Thurber published the controversial The Years with Ross which seems to have caused his estrangement from most of his old New Yorker colleagues.
ISBN:MYLIFEANDHARD
